Lowering the Cost of Government Innovation

Cloud technology is helping to modernize IT in support of good government. By moving to the consumption-based model of the cloud, government agencies can save money, innovate faster, and deliver capabilities that help achieve their mission.

From using artificial intelligence (AI) for facial recognition to bringing compute and storage to the tactical edge, a true hyperscale cloud enables government to lower IT costs and deliver innovative solutions to its most pressing challenges.

However, innovation is rarely easy. It usually doesn’t come on the first pass, and is frequently the culmination of years of testing—and failing. In the past, this would mean not only slow innovation, but also expensive projects that may not result in success. Through the use of the cloud, government agencies are empowered to “fail fast” and accelerate the pace of innovation—in a secure environment and without large upfront investments.

Cut costs while improving security

One example of how an organization was able to lower IT costs by using AWS is Advanced Survey Design (ASD). As a small business that supports organizational assessments for thousands of squadrons and battalions each year within the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, ASD requires both scalability and the strongest information security. For this, ASD turned to AWS GovCloud (US).

“What we got when we switched to Amazon was an improvement across the board in every metric. The cost dropped by more than 50%, security improved dramatically, we are now able to scale to over 2,500 respondents per hour, and the site runs better than it ever did before,” said Michael Schimpf, VP Operations at ASD.

Moving business applications to the AWS Cloud helps organizations simplify infrastructure management, deploy new services faster, provide greater availability, and lower costs.

Balance agility and innovation against cost

AWS also makes many innovative services available at a fraction of the price of on-premises solutions. Services like Amazon RDS for Aurora and Amazon Redshift help you run enterprise-grade solutions at one tenth of the cost of comparable on-premises solutions.

Of course, as multiple teams spin up instances to test new, innovative ideas, it is important to control and optimize cloud spending. Here are seven ways to drive cost optimization and focus on growth opportunities that can result from innovative ideas.

Open doors for innovation

The cost savings and agility of a hyperscale cloud, combined with the ability to use AWS at every data classification level—including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret—opens doors for government agencies to take advantage of the cloud for the warfighter and improve the lives of their citizens.

Learn more about how the evolution of cloud enables good government in our blog post here.