Tag: security

This year, global health and economy challenged government, education, nonprofit, and health organizations to rethink operations. With a focus on their mission, organizations quickly shifted to better and more quickly serve their constituents, students, and customers. Many took advantage of ways to innovate and consider adopting the cloud. AWS looked for ways to help these organizations, educating them on the power of the cloud—no matter where they were on their cloud journey—as well as sharing inspiring stories from their peers. Here’s what we learned.

State and local governments and health and human services (HHS) agencies provide key services to the nation’s most vulnerable and at risk populations such as healthcare, nutrition, economic, and other social support programs. HHS organizations were among the first to feel the impact of COVID-19 and its effects continue to linger and test aging infrastructure and limited technology systems. State and local government agencies made mission critical decisions to address those immediate needs and are preparing for resiliency moving forward. For this, they turned to the cloud. To help organizations discover how the cloud can help, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Health and Human Services Cloud Pavilion, an online, interactive learning environment.

If you are a technology professional looking to understand how cloud security adheres to compliance requirements, attend our AWS Compliance Week webinar series on November 2-6. You will learn how to architect compliant, multi-region cloud environments, establish agile governance for regulated workloads, and use new AWS solutions to help accelerate compliance. Hear government and industry perspectives on achieving high compliance from the General Services Administration’s FedRAMP program management office, and customers Maxar, Salesforce, and Coalfire.

According to the 2020 Deloitte-NASCIO Cybersecurity Study for state governments, 54 percent of states are not confident in their ability to protect emerging technology. Traditional cybersecurity approaches can result in singularly focused solutions that don’t provide holistic protection. It can also inhibit an organizations’ ability to monitor and respond to security threats in real time. As more organizations shift to cloud-based workloads, security mechanisms and components need to be developed and integrated using a Security by Design (SbD) approach. Our AWS Partners have developed pre-configured security solutions, which allow customers to deploy applications using SbD strategies and also use AWS security solutions to ensure continuous security alignment. 

A new IDC whitepaper, sponsored by AWS, “How Government Agencies Meet Security and Compliance Requirements in the Cloud” examines why federal agencies are moving more systems and information to the cloud as a launching point for agency-wide IT modernization. The paper shares executive, legislative, and other government-wide initiatives influencing agencies to accelerate their cloud adoption plans, risks IT leaders face by delaying cloud migrations, and how secure, compliant cloud environments help agencies achieve compliance and security for their sensitive workloads.

To help our public sector customers in Sweden accelerate their journey to the cloud, we are launching the AWS ClearStart program. AWS ClearStart helps organizations meet security and regulatory needs through a set of guides, trainings, technology tools, and cloud computing experts to simplify the process of complying with Swedish and EU regulations, including the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (OSL) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as with international information security standards, such as ISO/IEC27001.

Serverless applications are typically discreet pieces of code that customers can use to manage security-related processes or stitch together multiple AWS services to solve a larger problem. They allow customers to build and run applications and services without dealing with infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning. In this blog, I explain the serverless computing model, the Serverless Application Repository (SAR), solution constructs and implementations, why they matter to our government customers, and how they can use them to solve common problems.

Governments at all levels rapidly addressed the rising challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadian governments  met citizens’ needs quickly by building secure, compliant solutions on AWS to deliver critical information and services. Working with partners and AWS, Canadian governments and agencies released multiple solutions for providing a modern, digital-first experience for all to interact with the government and receive the information and services they need.

We’re in the midst of the information age and the Internet of Things (IoT) is at the center. What is IoT? It describes the billions of devices around the world that are connected to the internet, devices that can capture and analyze data and then perform an action based on that analysis. Whether it is an emerging IoT device, an innovative solution pivot, or a tried-and-true IoT application, a few things remain constant: we can look to leading examples from smart cities and healthcare to understand current and future uses and securely deploying and managing devices is an absolute must.

Government agencies and public sector organizations need rapidly deployable and dependable security solutions to support their missions. In response to this need, AWS launched the Security Solutions for Government Workloads initiative under the Authority to Operate (ATO) on AWS Program. This initiative works with AWS Public Sector Partners, members of the AWS Partner Network (APN), to develop security solutions designed to meet the unique security and compliance requirements of public sector workloads.