Tag: federal government

This year, to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the Biden administration committed to making free COVID-19 test kits available to U.S. households through covidtests.gov. AWS is honored to support this initiative by working with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to make sure the website for test kit ordering meets nationwide demand.

The Uniformed Services University Health System (USUHS) is the nation’s federal health professions academy, offering a curriculum and educational experience that emphasizes military healthcare, leadership, readiness, and public health. Each year, USUHS holds a training exercise called Operation Gunpowder to help prepare third-year medical students for varying field-care challenges they may encounter during their service. Over the course of the eight weeks prior to the training exercise, AWS collaborated with Deloitte to deliver ancillary system and operational medicine telemedicine best practice training to the participating students. “This is the first time telemed has truly delivered,” reported attending experts in special operations medicine.

Whether filing taxes, applying for student financial aid, seeking healthcare coverage, or receiving disaster support, every interaction with the federal government is an opportunity to strengthen the customer experience with rich citizen engagement and direct lines of feedback. But legacy technology, siloed data, lack of digital skills, and a one-size-fits-all design approach can limit the ability of government to meet the demands of their constituents. Using cloud technology and AWS can improve customer understanding, create personalized interactions, and modernize constituent experiences.

On April 1, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released the 1950 Census data to the general public. Census data is released 72 years after a census is conducted, and it has been 10 years since the last census data for the 1940 Census was publicly released. With the support of cloud technologies, this release marks a number of important firsts. AWS is honored to support the release of the 1950 Census and help make this data available to the public.

Increased digitalization is transforming the payments landscape. Over 85 countries, representing over 90% of global GDP, are researching the possibility of launching a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). However, as central banks evaluate the pros and cons of CBDCs, they are considering different approaches and designs to address the variety of needs and situations of each country. To advance understanding in this space, AWS worked with the Oliver Wyman Forum on a whitepaper which outlines a framework that can help support policymakers in evaluating the interdependencies between policy and technology choices. In this blog post, we summarize key principles outlined in the framework.

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.

AWS Top Secret-West is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret U.S. security classification level. The new Region adds multiple Availability Zones geographically separated from AWS Top Secret-East. With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions.

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.

Since 2003, the US federal government has made approximately $1.7 trillion in improper payments, with an estimated $206 billion made in FY 2020 alone. Improper payments are now anticipated to increase proportionally to new levels of federal spending. How can agencies fight improper payments at this scale? And what tools can agencies use to address fraud, erroneous data submission and other causes of this problem? Agencies can use AWS to solve the multi-sided issues of payment integrity.

President Biden’s executive order emphasizes the need to elevate information security as a core tenet of national security, and calls on federal agencies and public sector organizations to work with the private sector to prioritize the data security and privacy of the American people and government. AWS and AWS Partners can help government agencies align with the initiatives in this executive order.