Tag: AWS Institute

Governments are sharing their technology solutions with other governments through open source tools. These tools are helping state, local, and federal governments respond quicker, and at the scale needed, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, one of the challenges governments face is finding out what open source tools are available. To help public sector customers use open source tools better, AWS launched Open Government Solutions, which aggregates open source projects and assets from public sector entities around the globe for governments at all levels to find, adapt, and reuse. During a panel conversation around the launch, government leaders outlined five key reasons why governments are choosing open source technologies to deliver citizen services.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that public sector organizations need modern infrastructure, capabilities and controls to overcome the disruption caused by global health outbreaks. Organizations that embraced cloud services proved more responsive. They were able to continue operating remotely and serving their customers and citizens, demonstrating agility, scalability, and speed. In How Governments Can Build Resilience in a New Normal: Emerging Practices from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, a new policy paper from the AWS Institute, we outline how organizations can use the cloud to recover from the disruption that the virus brought, as well as become more resilient for future challenges.

At Amazon, we are committed to providing immediate relief and response to global communities impacted by natural disasters. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Disaster Response team plays an important role in this response, and the team has supported customers worldwide in the wake of hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks including COVID-19. We help by bringing our operational and logistics expertise, as well as cloud technology to support our customers and our communities when and where they need it most, working closely with organizations like the American Red Cross.

The topic of food insecurity is personal for so many of us. Both of my parents were school teachers in Pulaski County, Kentucky, a county that has a 21.3 percent food insecurity rate for children—the same rate of childhood hunger as where I live now in Washington, DC. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), more than 11 million children across the country struggle with hunger and live in food insecure households. Here are ways that AWS technology is helping address this challenging issue.

As we continue to work with public sector bodies around the world, AWS understands how valuable open source software and development communities are at this time. To accelerate the combined global response to COVID-19, we gathered examples of third-party open code, tools, and standards that reformers in the public sector can immediately use. We’ve included these in a new resource now available in Open Government Solutions.

Education ministries, colleges, and schools around the world are rapidly adopting remote learning and working to maintain business continuity and provide students with continued access to education. From quickly scaling learning management systems and launching virtual classrooms to upskilling educators and setting up remote help-desks, AWS and its education technology partners are providing mission-critical infrastructure that is enabling our customers to continue delivering against their missions, safely and efficiently. From Italy to Bahrain to the United States, check out these stories.

At the Education World Forum (EWF) in London, global leader for workforce and education at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Andrew Ko discussed the workforce shortage in cloud skills – and the importance of piloting initiatives that “cloudify” curriculum to skill-up, upskill, and reskill students, educators, the current workforce, and IT leaders.

This year’s AWS Government Delegation Day at re:Invent in Las Vegas had a similar look and feel to last year’s inaugural program – but with a more global and expansive twist. The 2019 program welcomed a diverse crowd of international government executives from 40 countries, including from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Canada, and the Middle East. Over 300 government officials made the trip to Las Vegas for this customized talent development initiative focused on these key themes.

Since 2015, 11 communities in the United States have reached “functional zero” – effectively ending chronic or veteran homelessness and demonstrating that although homelessness is a complex challenge, it is solvable. By reaching this milestone, communities in Built for Zero, a national initiative comprised of more than 70 U.S. communities, have shown that real-time, personal-level data can empower organizations to respond to the homelessness challenge. These communities measurably ended homelessness when they followed these best practices.

When considering digital transformation, governments tend to focus on the potential drawbacks instead of focusing on the risks of failing to adopt new technologies. A newly released report by Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, “The Risk of the Digital Status Quo,” outlines four risks of forgoing digital modernization in Canada and offers strategies to address those risks.