AWS Public Sector Blog

From research sharing to collaborative communications: Addressing the needs of our public sector customers during unprecedented times

In support of governments and educational institutions around the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is quickly deploying people and technology to enable remote learning and home working. Our services can help address our customer’s most pressing challenges during this unprecedented time, including making sure citizens are productive with remote working solutions, that students can access online learning platforms, and that communications are reliable and available for public entities at all levels of government.

Solutions include Amazon Chime’s video call and conference capabilities and Amazon Workspaces’ remote working environments, both of which can assist students and employees in remaining productive while self-isolating. We can jumpstart organizations’ ability to quickly stand up and scale their tools and infrastructure with in-kind services and credits that help cover costs and keep operations running. Customers can also access services and solutions through our extensive AWS Partner Network (APN).

Specifically, we have a range of quick on-ramp options, support, and AWS Promotional Credit to help public sector customers quickly provide:

  1. Remote Education: Amazon Chime or Amazon WorkSpaces for government schools and nonprofit educational institutions for students.
  2. Remote Government Work: Amazon Chime or Amazon WorkSpaces for federal, state/provincial, and municipal governments.
  3. Accelerate Healthcare Research: Tools and initiatives to speed research, innovation, and development to speed our collective understanding and detection of COVID-19. AWS can also help our customers that are working on diagnostics, treatments, vaccine development, and telehealth services.

To help address these immediate needs, AWS is providing no-cost usage of Amazon Chime, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon WorkDocs through June 30. Learn more about AWS solutions for remote employees, students, and contact center agents.

We also recently launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative – a program to support customers who are working to bring better, more accurate, diagnostics solutions to market faster and promote better collaboration across organizations that are working on similar problems. As part of this, we are committing an initial investment of $20 million to accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development to speed our collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 and other innovate diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks. Funding will be provided through a combination of AWS in-kind credits and technical support to assist our customers’ research teams in harnessing the full potential of the cloud to tackle this challenge. Learn more here.

AWS also joined the White House COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. We are offering research institutions and companies technical support and AWS Promotional Credit for the use of AWS services to advance research on diagnosis, treatment, and vaccine studies relating to the coronavirus and its effects.

Whether in a time of crisis or a time of government need, AWS is ready to provide support to our public sector customers. We are available to immediately engage our technologists and teams to develop and deploy the solutions and analysis required to relieve some of the most pressing challenges the government currently faces.

Please reach out if we can be of help in developing successful solutions together. And learn more about how AWS can help on Jeff Barr’s Blog.