Tag: public sector

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.

In this blog post, we explore a use case for government organizations using the OpenStreetMap (OSM) dataset, a free, editable map of the world, created and maintained by volunteers and available for use with an open license. Using open source tools, we generate and render custom maps for a government’s digital property. By leveraging Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and multi-tiered architectures, map tiles server can run in an efficient and highly available infrastructure.

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.

Pairing Amazon EC2 instances with a Windows Server provides a secure and reliable environment to quickly deploy and run Microsoft Exchange Server. Many of our customers have opted for this architecture, which is compatible with several versions of Exchange Server, including 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

At this year’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS made important announcements and hosted unique activities relevant to our government, education, and nonprofit customers. Below are ten takeaways from re:Invent 2017 that have particular relevance for the public sector

This week, we hosted Enabling the Warfighter: Bringing Cloud to the Tactical Edge, a webcast focused on how cloud computing is more than just storing the Pentagon’s vast quantities of data; it’s providing warfighters with the capabilities necessary to dominate the modern battlefield.