Tag: government

At the AWS Nonprofit Hackathon for Good, 484 participants built solutions to help relieve the burden on developers in the government who are facing increasing demands on their systems during COVID-19. Hackathon participants were tasked with improving the workflows of the frontline developers who maintain mission-critical COBOL applications. The winning solution created an integrated developer environment (IDE) extension for COBOL syntax highlighting, and is now available in the VS Code Marketplace.

Thank you to all active and retired military members for your service. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are honored to work together with our nation’s Veterans—from helping transitioning Veterans begin their pathway in the cloud to hiring military spouses to supporting military families. In celebration of this year’s Veterans Day, check out some of our new resources and additional programs dedicated to serving this community.

As education has shifted to remote delivery, traditional mechanisms for engaging students and creating practical learning opportunities have had to adapt too. One mechanism—the hackathon—is increasingly taking place virtually. Typically, hackathons are in-person technology events where teams or individuals create solutions to a specific problem or challenge in a short timeframe, often 24 hours or a weekend. Hackathons are also social learning events where peers can connect, learn from each other, seek support from technical experts, and produce a cool (even if imperfect) solution. Cloud technology tools and resources can help virtual hackathons be as successful as traditional hackathons.

Nobody wants to lose data—and setting a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to zero makes this intent clear. Customers with government mission-critical systems often need to meet this requirement, since any amount of data loss will cause harm. RPO covers both resilience and disaster recovery—everything from the loss of an individual physical disk to an entire data center. Existing systems support RPO zero through a combination of architecture patterns (including resilient messaging) and on-premises legacy databases. Frequently interpreted as a database or storage requirement, providing for RPO zero requires thinking about the entire system. To do so, you can use AWS services and architecture patterns, which provide resilience to failure with clustering, auto scaling, and failover across multiple data centers within one region.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released an interim rule, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Assessing Contractor Implementation of Cybersecurity Requirements (DFARS Case 2019–D041), which includes NIST SP 800-171 and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) assessment methodology and requirements. Organizations have been planning for CMMC, and with the release of this interim rule, are now beginning to prepare and build strategy for CMMC compliance. Learn how you can build your CMMC strategy using cloud technologies.

This year, AWS is a gold sponsor of AI for Good, the action-oriented technology-education platform hosted by the United Nations (UN). The organization is delivering a webinar series to provide best practices around how to adopt AI and ML technologies. With less than 10 years remaining to achieve the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, organizations all over the world are using AWS services to deliver various AI and ML-enabled solutions—from delivering disaster-relief services at the edge to reconnecting telecommunications after a hurricane. We are also helping organizations adopt AI and ML technologies more readily in the areas of computer vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language process to solve ongoing global challenges.

A new agreement between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the UK government will accelerate adoption of cloud computing in the public sector while saving taxpayer money, boosting digital skills across the civil service, and increasing the diversity of suppliers to the government by helping more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to take part in public sector contracts. The agreement, called the “One Government Value Agreement” (OGVA), is a three-year, Memorandum of Understanding between AWS and the Crown Commercial Service (CCS). By treating participating UK government and public sector organisations as a single client, it offers greater cost savings for cloud deployments, similar to those available to large commercial customers.

Last month, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered building business resiliency, upskilling the next generation of cloud talent, machine learning in college sports, and more. Check out the latest episode of The Brief to learn more about business resiliency, and check out the other top stories linked below.

In an environment that is constantly changing due to COVID-19, increased competition, ever-evolving customer sentiments, and emerging technologies, financial services organizations are feeling the pressure to innovate. At the same time, the expectations for an effective risk management program have also increased in response to cyber threats, regulatory pressures, market fluctuations, and increasingly sophisticated financial criminals. Advancements in cloud computing are enabling organizations to improve their risk-management capabilities to get ahead of issues while continuing to deliver on and evolve their business strategy. Learn how the cloud empowers organizations to innovate and effectively manage risk—two enterprises that are often perceived as contradictory but can actually be complimentary.

Driven by the need for greater productivity, lower costs, and more recently being able to scale a remote workforce, organizations around the world are moving their IT workloads to the cloud. Planning a move to the cloud requires upfront pre-migration planning; this is as important as the implementation itself. But it can be daunting to know where to start or what needs to be in place for a successful migration. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) can help provide insight into your level of readiness and what you can do to improve it.