Tag: federal government

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.

The U.S. government has spent the last 16 years moving toward IPv6 adoption, requiring federal agencies to operationally deploy IPv6 for public internet servers and internal applications. AWS is committed to the enablement of IPv6, and our cloud services enable public sector customers to move to IPv6 as mission allows.

Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.

This month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) celebrates 50 years of “science, service, and stewardship.” Over the past five decades, NOAA has demonstrated its ability to push the boundaries of technological innovation to collect and understand data, as well as share that knowledge and information with others. AWS supports NOAA’s mission, in particular by providing public access to the agency’s environmental datasets since 2015 through the Registry of Open Data on AWS.

The fourth episode of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast mini-series by Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now live. We dove into how two federal government customers—the Smithsonian Institution and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center—use the cloud to reduce operational costs and find new ways to deliver on their missions.