Tag: AWS Institute

Governments are increasingly adopting digital ID systems to improve inclusion and accessibility to public services. Based on the experiences shared by governments and by AWS experts who have worked to implement digital ID around the world, six lessons emerge about how to create the right strategic mindset for digital ID creation and implementation.

As government services around the world become increasingly digitalized, digital ID systems — many running on the cloud — are a critical part of these digital transformations. In this post, we dive deep into how these digital ID systems are strategically designed around a common vision, and how the cloud can help.

As governments around the world digitize services, individuals are required not only to prove their identities, but to do so on digital channels. This is a challenge not only for people without legal ID, but also for individuals with ID documents that are hard to use digitally. Cloud-based digital ID systems can be a solution to this challenge. Plus, digital ID creates a robust scope of benefits — and cloud-based approaches to implementing these systems provide the speed, scale, and security needed for digital ID to succeed.

A recent report by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, reveals that moving enterprise and public sector IT workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud can reduce energy consumption and associated carbon emissions by nearly 80%, and is five times more energy efficient than the typical on-premises Asia Pacific (APAC) data center.

Accreditation programs and the organizational models that support them are priority considerations for public sector managers who are modernizing their IT. But managers often consider risk and compliance issues too late in the planning stage. Here are some key principles that can prevent accreditation-related issues from becoming a roadblock to cloud adoption.

Governments have similar problems and are not in competition, so using technology that others have developed and made freely available via open source to transform essential services makes sense. To make open source solutions easier to find for governments, AWS recently created an online repository: Open Government Solutions.

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

Research exploring how humans work with machines to solve problems in fields ranging from space to sustainability has established the potential to create far-reaching change in children’s education. The test-bed project is part of a wider program set up by Oxford University with support from AWS. Researchers have been as surprised by how quickly they have reached results as they are pleased with the outcomes. One of the test-beds, the Oxford X-Reality Hub Ed Tech project, set out to investigate how virtual reality (VR) could transform the classroom experience and close the gap between disadvantaged groups of pupils who statistically do less well than their peers.

Looking at information security as an enabler for change, not a blocker, was the mind shift that contributed to digital transformation in UK government. The UK modernization of data classification concepts and processes enabled more responsive public services, as well as massive savings (£1.7bn in 2014 alone). From 2012 through 2015, the authors of this blog worked together in the Cabinet Office in the UK to reform a decades-old information security policy. This effort helped unlock widespread cloud adoption in the UK public sector and the advantages that come with it.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, by 2030 most of the United States’s economic and employment growth will be generated by 30 percent of the population, living and working in 25 mega regions. In the high-growth tech sector, employers cannot find enough urban employees to fill available jobs. Meanwhile, nearly 25 percent of Americans live in rural areas characterized by shrinking employment in traditional industries such as manufacturing and agriculture. Is migration from rural areas to mega-cities the only solution? Do rural workers have the skills needed to transition to tech sector jobs? In this Q&A, Brendan Walsh of the 1901 Group talks to the AWS Institute about opportunities to build cloud technology skills and employment in rural communities in the United States. Brendan dispels some of the myths about barriers to rural skill building.