Tag: public sector

To kick off the AWS Opioid Crisis Council’s inaugural meeting, AWS public health leader, Michael Jackson, convened a panel of healthcare experts at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. Government health officials, research scientists, pharmacy executives, and industry pioneers examined proposed solutions with open data, and shared ideas for attacking this complex issue. All stakeholders rallied around a common customer: our community.

The AWS Credit Program for Nonprofits offers $2,000 of AWS Promotional Credits annually to 501c3 organizations or global equivalents. With diverse missions to promote health and welfare, achieve medical breakthroughs, protect wildlife, and support many other causes, nonprofits around the world have unique needs. In collaboration with TechSoup Global, this program provides organizations in 50 countries with subsidized access to on-demand services to more easily store large files, keep data secure, and deliver engaging content to local communities.

As public sector organizations seek to enhance their technology to respond to the growing demand for digital services, public sector organizations can face budgetary and operational challenges. Here’s where the cloud comes in. It can expedite the path from idea to execution, helping you step beyond the IT office to communicate value and build consensus among your stakeholders.

No matter where you work, accounting for your costs can be complex. This is especially true in the public sector, where organizations, universities, and other entities are required to adhere to strict accounting constraints – particularly when accounting for grants and other forms of external funding. Oftentimes, customers use external funding to purchase cloud resources, so it is important that these funds are only allocated towards costs associated with the specific researcher or project for which the external funding was obtained.

As we find ourselves working with a growing number of public sector customers, it’s important to look back at how the dialogue around public sector cloud adoption has evolved. This is particularly relevant for security, as we continue to earn trust with organizations around the safe-keeping of their data in the cloud.

Government organizations use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address their unique challenges, requirements, and missions. We listen to our customers then innovate and deliver technology that helps them solve problems faster, adapt to changing environments, deal with sudden demand, and adhere to the highest security standards. With AWS, government organizations can rapidly prototype, trying several architectures in parallel, allowing them to more quickly evaluate their options and move to full deployment for new programs and systems.

Twitter has hundreds of millions of active users each month and supports multiple languages on their platform. These users engage with nonprofits, need citizen services, and learn at schools, universities, and other educational institutions. As a consequence, public sector organizations look to social media not only to communicate with the public, but also to gain insights about the citizens, volunteers, and students they serve. Wouldn’t it be great to know if people had positive or negative opinions about your city, school, nonprofit, or organization? What are they talking about and how many other people share that view?

For soldiers in remote or “disconnected” environments, video content must be delivered securely and it must be tailored based on roles, missions, and other factors. Previously, troops stationed around the world would struggle with distribution and network connectivity challenges that prevented them from accessing military command videos, training videos, entertainment, or even the ability to call home. With the launch of AWS Media Services, government and military agencies can bring connectivity to the edge.

The cloud enables organizations to achieve their missions faster, speed up innovation, and save costs by scaling up quickly without the lengthy and costly process of acquiring additional hardware. Although more public sector organizations are adopting the cloud for mission-critical workloads, misconceptions about vendor lock-in still exist.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides patient care and federal benefits to Veterans and their dependents. The organization is split up into silos of health, benefit, and cemetery benefits; VA’s web presence was similarly fractured and users had difficulty interacting with VA online. The U.S. Digital Service team at VA looked across VA’s many products from the point of view of the Veteran. What do they want to do? How do they want to interact with VA? They started as a small team, iteratively building out features on Vets.gov.