AWS Public Sector Blog

Education users take advantage of VMware-based cloud services for the rapid delivery of cloud benefits to traditional applications and VMware-based environments. A VMware hybrid-cloud solution offers a compatible, interoperable environment with full workload portability so that you can rapidly move to a public cloud service without making any changes to your applications. This is ideal for disaster recovery, dev/test environments, data center consolidation, rapid project delivery, or simply getting out of the data center business.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides patient care and federal benefits to Veterans and their dependents. The organization is split up into silos of health, benefit, and cemetery benefits; VA’s web presence was similarly fractured and users had difficulty interacting with VA online. The U.S. Digital Service team at VA looked across VA’s many products from the point of view of the Veteran. What do they want to do? How do they want to interact with VA? They started as a small team, iteratively building out features on Vets.gov.

U.S. federal customers move workloads of all sizes to the AWS Cloud. These projects range from single deliverables to complete data center migrations, frequently implemented across multiple AWS accounts for cost-containment and security purposes. Regardless of size though, our customers face common governance challenges.

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.

Pairing Amazon EC2 instances with a Windows Server provides a secure and reliable environment to quickly deploy and run Microsoft Exchange Server. Many of our customers have opted for this architecture, which is compatible with several versions of Exchange Server, including 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

The United Nations (UN) has named 17 goals that will help boost sustainable development worldwide. Technology and cloud-based solutions will be a critical part of achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs). DigitalGlobe, one of the world’s leading providers of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and analysis, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), has launched the GBDX for Sustainability Challenge. We are looking for passionate participants who can leverage machine learning and high-resolution satellite imagery for geospatial solutions that support these sustainable development goals, such as disaster response, food security, poverty elimination, and ending malaria, to name a few.

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.

The China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) satellites are the result of a cooperation agreement between Brazilian and Chinese space agencies (INPE and CAST, respectively) started in 1988. Since then, five satellites have launched (CBERS-1/2/2A/3/4).

AWS customers did amazing work with open data this year. Here are some of the stories from the year, including releases of massive new datasets, tutorials on how to work with data in the cloud, and stories of how people are using AWS to put open data to work.

At this year’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS made important announcements and hosted unique activities relevant to our government, education, and nonprofit customers. Below are ten takeaways from re:Invent 2017 that have particular relevance for the public sector