Five Things You May Not Know About AWS in the Public Sector

At AWS, we are committed to continually delivering new features, services, and tools for our customers. For our public sector team, this means helping governments, educators, and nonprofits around the world advance their mission through technology.

We strive to meet our customers not only where they are now, but also where they want to be in the future. This requires constant innovation and rapid development of public sector solutions each year. In 2017, this took the form of the AWS Secret Region, achieving DoD Impact Level 5, and making AWS Educate available to students ages 14 and older – just to name a few highlights.

Whether you missed it or helped us build it, these five important updates from 2017 are shifting the way the public sector is interacting with the cloud.

1.    The New AWS Secret Region

The AWS Secret Region can operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. The U.S. intelligence community (IC) can access the Region through its Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with AWS. The AWS Secret Region also will be available to non-IC U.S. government customers with appropriate Secret-level network access and their own contract vehicles for use of the AWS Secret Region.
2.    AWS Achieves DoD Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization

AWS achieved a Provisional Authorization (PA) by the Defense Information Systems Agency for Impact Level (IL) 5 workloads, as defined in the Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing (CC) Security Requirements Guide (SRG), in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Now DoD customers and contractors working with the DoD can leverage AWS’s PA to meet DoD CC SRG IL5 (in addition to IL2 and IL4) compliance requirements. This further bolsters AWS’s support of the DoD’s critical mission to protect our security.
3.    AWS Educate Now Available to Students Ages 14 and Up

Students ages 14 and older can now access AWS Educate. This expands access to the cloud and its many applications for high school and secondary school students around the world. The specialized, introductory content and hands-on activities are designed to get younger students comfortable with the basics of cloud computing. It also introduces them to tools such as AWS’s AI services, including Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition.

4.    Security Assurance Package Submitted to the Government of Canada

AWS reached a major milestone in its ability to drive cloud transformation for the Government of Canada (GC). We demonstrated that we are ready to meet the Cloud Security Profile for Protected B / Medium Integrity / Medium Availability (PBMM). This means that AWS is in alignment with how GC IT Services leverages internationally recognized, widely accepted accreditations. This empowers adopting organizations to benefit from independently validated audits and assessments without any redundant work.

5. Data.world Census Data Now Available as AWS Public Dataset

The American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) is now available as an AWS Public Dataset. AWS and data.world collaborated to make the data accessible for processing and analysis in the cloud, with elastic computing resources. The ACS affects $400 billion in annual spending and its data helps paint a picture of important trends impacting the economy. Learn more about this launch here.

Discover how else AWS is serving the public sector here.