Improve Operations and Increase Efficiencies with the AWS Cloud

State and local government customers are leveraging the AWS Cloud for a variety of government operations every day. From elections and city planning to digital libraries and payment systems, government customers are recognizing efficiencies, flexibility, and cost savings made possible through cloud technology.

Cloud technology is helping governments innovate for and with citizens. Check out some of the ways governments are using the cloud to help deliver improved citizen services.

Over 2,300 government agencies have turned to AWS to provide secure, cost effective, and scalable IT infrastructure. The expectations of an increasingly digital citizenry are high, yet all levels of government are facing budgetary and human resource constraints. Adoption of cloud computing provides access to new deployment models with significant cost and agility benefits. Although each organization has its unique set of challenges in cloud adoption, read the case studies below to learn from other governments about how they use cloud computing, how the cloud has changed the way government does business, and how it has helped create essential tools for service delivery.

A few examples include:

• New York Public Library – The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections platform makes available 677,496 items spanning a wide range of eras, geographies, and media, and includes drawings, manuscripts, maps, photographs, rare books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of NYPL, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences. While that’s a small fraction of the Library’s holdings, the aim of Digital Collections is to provide context for the digitized materials and to inspire people to use and reuse the media and data to advance knowledge and create new works. Cloud technology has simplified access to a part of the Library’s collection that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to access. The NYPL created not only an elegant user interface, but also provided flexible search tools to make finding material easier. Users can search and browse NYPL’s collections with ease compared to the various trips they would have had to make in the past.
• City of Los Angeles, CA – While the City of Los Angeles is known for sunshine and celebrities, it is also the largest cyber target on the West Coast. With the world’s sixth busiest airport (LAX), the largest port in the Western hemisphere, a high profile police department, and infrastructure supporting 4 million residents, the city must deploy innovative, world-class cybersecurity to protect digital assets, requiring it to collect, correlate, and analyze mountains of data on cyber threats. Against the backdrop of limited resources, the city implemented a unique, cloud-based enterprise security solution, known as the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC). The City of LA needed to proactively tackle the rapidly growing cyber threats attempting to infiltrate digital assets. Given the limited resources, the City of LA implemented a unique, cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution for the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC), to help consolidate, maintain, and analyze security data across the city’s departments.
• DC Health Benefit Exchange – DC Health Link is the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace created to support the federal health laws known as the Affordable Care Act. The website helps District residents, small businesses, members of Congress, and their staff obtain quality, affordable medical, dental, or vision coverage. To reach goals of sustainability, and become the first US state or territory where every resident has quality, affordable health coverage, DC Health Link moved mission critical IT into the AWS Cloud, adopted an agile delivery model, and re-architected the website using open source technology. This approach achieved significant increases in enrollment, website performance, and cost savings.

Check out more perspectives on how governments are breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in this AWS Public Sector Summit session, “Modernizing Government in the Cloud,” featuring Jay Haque, Director of Development Operations and Enterprise Computing at the New York Public Library.

Are you interested in learning more about how state and local governments are cutting costs, digitizing old systems, solving data challenges and improving access and customer experience by leveraging the AWS Cloud? If so, then visit: https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/government-operations-and-efficiencies/