AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: resiliency planning

Evaluating long-term value in migrating ERP and SIS applications to AWS

Evaluating long-term value in migrating ERP and SIS applications to AWS

Organizations can realize significant benefits when migrating their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and student information systems (SIS) to AWS, including reduced costs, fewer security incidents, and improved agility. Education institutions, though, face slightly different decision-making contexts when evaluating which cloud provider to use to host these applications. In this blog post, explore several considerations associated with your decision and the total value that you can realize over a medium and long-term horizon when you migrate ERP and SIS applications to AWS.

Creating a strategic approach to government continuity

Moving digital assets to the cloud is one of the first steps governments can take to secure their public services against large-scale disruptions. But according to our customers, this journey often brings challenges and roadblocks that are organizational rather than technical. Learn key takeaways from our engagements with public sector customers that can help you better prepare for this transformation.

The true costs of resiliency decisions

Many organizations may not fully recognize or calculate the true costs of workload resiliency decisions. These true costs include the full spectrum of costing considerations that make up a decision, from readily-determinable accounting costs to less-recognizable intangible costs. As public sector organizations often have limited resources and complex missions, it’s important to understand the true costs and economic impact involved in a resiliency decision; this can help these organizations to both prepare and plan with their available resources.

Best practices for creating highly available workloads

Many public sector organizations that are moving to the cloud often misunderstand that the architecture of AWS Regions and Availability Zones fundamentally changes how they should think about disaster recovery and resiliency. In this blog post, I share some best practices to answer common questions about building highly available workloads, and share some ways to consider high availability, disaster recovery, and application resiliency within AWS.

How Livingston Parish prepares for natural disasters by improving resiliency in the cloud

Natural disasters are devastating, often resulting in loss of life, massive property damage, and damage to the critical infrastructure that powers emergency services. This can prompt public sector organizations to consider building more resilient infrastructure. Such was the case for the 911 system in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, an agency that dispatches for 21 public safety agencies including law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical services, and averages over 325 calls for service per day. After a major flood in 2016 knocked out their 911 system, they worked with AWS Partner TailorBuilt Solutions, LLC. to use AWS to become resilient against disaster, reducing service interruptions and improving response times.

The Goldilocks zone for disaster recovery, business continuity planning, and disaster preparedness

Disaster recovery is a crucial investment for public sector organizations. However, out-of-date disaster recovery and business continuity planning (BCP) policies prevent organizations from improving in these essential areas—like the assumption that the more distance between data centers, the better. But is there a point where more distance between data centers has diminishing risk mitigation returns? Enter the Goldilocks zone for disaster recovery, in which the distance between data centers is not too close, not too far, but just right.

close up of hand with pen writing checklist in notebook

5 best practices for resiliency planning using AWS

Organizations face a host of threats to business continuity, from extreme weather events to cyber-attacks to human error. Many turn to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to house their workloads in an environment that can withstand disruptions of any type or scale. IT resilience hinges on developing strong architectural, technological, and operational management. Cloud environments require assembly, execution, and maintenance. Here are five best practices for organizations to build IT resilience.

man's hand moving pin and string on design board

Addressing emergencies and disruptions to create business continuity

While disruptive events are challenging for any organization, sudden and large-scale incidents such as natural disasters, IT outages, pandemics, and cyber-attacks can expose critical gaps in technology, culture, and organizational resiliency. Even smaller, unexpected events such as water damage to a critical facility or electrical outages can negatively impact your organization if there is no long-term resiliency plan in place. These events can have significant consequences on your employees, stakeholders, and mission, and can result in long-term financial losses, lost productivity, loss of life, a deterioration of trust with citizens and customers, and lasting reputational damage.