AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: AWS KMS

gavel on keyboard

Customers in all 50 states in US can now host criminal justice information on AWS

After a multi-year journey working with the mission critical application technology providers and Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) officials across the US, Amazon Web Services (AWS) implemented a simple and technically robust approach to CJIS compliance. Now, agencies and organizations in all 50 states in the US can host criminal justice information (CJI) on AWS.

Blockchain makes student achievement records safe and simple to share with portable credentials

Students’ educational achievements—including academic transcripts, work history, and skill credentialing—are often scattered across multiple institutions and disparate IT systems. EdTechs are adopting blockchain technology to simplify this process, with credential portability, data privacy, simplified workflows, and added data security.

close up of judge signing paperwork with pen and gavel

A journey of innovation in CJIS compliance

To protect citizens and save lives, justice and public safety agencies rely on timely access to critical information, such as criminal histories, arrest warrants, stolen vehicles, and 911 call data. Providing this mission critical criminal justice information with five nines (99.999%) availability and protecting it according to the rigorous security requirements prescribed in the Criminal Justice Information Services Security Policy are top priorities for criminal justice agencies (CJA). AWS’s innovative features and security controls can help customers achieve CJIS compliance in a simplified way.

Baltimore harbor at sunset

Addressing housing barriers with the cloud: Baltimore launches My Digital Data Locker

Removing the barriers to rehousing, especially for those chronically homeless, is a critical part of a community’s efforts to combat homelessness. This month, the City of Baltimore is launching My Digital Data Locker, an innovative cloud-based platform that gives people who are experiencing homelessness a secure place to manage digital copies of vital documents. This service reduces one of the key barriers to housing for people experiencing homelessness: vital document storage and access. The solution uses the cloud.

Photo by Hunter Harritt on Unsplash

Modern data engineering in higher ed: Doing DataOps atop a data lake on AWS

Modern data engineering covers several key components of building a modern data lake. Most databases and data warehouses, to an extent, do not lend themselves well to a DevOps model. DataOps grew out of frustrations trying to build a scalable, reusable data pipeline in an automated fashion. DataOps was founded on applying DevOps principles on top of data lakes to help build automated solutions in a more agile manner. With DataOps, users apply principles of data processing on the data lake to curate and collect the transformed data for downstream processing. One reason that DevOps was hard on databases was because testing was hard to automate on such systems. At California State University Chancellors Office (CSUCO), we took a different approach by residing most of our logic with a programming framework that allows us to build a testable platform. Learn how to apply DataOps in ten steps.

Amazon S3 Glacier

Securing Amazon S3 Glacier with a customer-managed encryption key

Customer managed encryption keys are a common architecture requirement within highly regulated workloads. This post demonstrates how to satisfy this requirement within Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), including Amazon S3 Glacier. We also clarify some common points of confusion and demonstrate how objects can be uploaded directly to Amazon S3 Glacier via Amazon S3, which can help meet regulatory requirements as well as potentially save budget.

Analytics Without Limits: FINRA’s Scalable and Secure Big Data Architecture – Part 2

A guest post by John Brady, CISSP, VP Cyber Security/CISO, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) oversees more than 3,900 securities firms with approximately 640,000 brokers. Every day, we watch over nearly 6 billion shares traded in U.S. equities markets—using technology powerful enough to help detect fraud, abuse and insider trading. In […]

Building a cloud-specific incident response plan

In order for your organization to be prepared before a security event occurs, there are unique security visibility, and automation controls that AWS provides. Incident response does not only have to be reactive. With the cloud, your ability to proactively detect, react, and recover can be easier, faster, cheaper, and more effective. What is an […]