Ushering in a New Era of Productivity and Innovation in the Public Sector

A post by Tricia Davis-Muffett, Director of Global Public Sector Marketing, Amazon Web Services

It’s not a secret that AWS is used by many of the hottest silicon valley startups and success stories, like Hulu and Netflix. But what you might not know is that AWS is also used by companies and organizations across a range of industries and segments who are transforming through technology.

The pressure to innovate and drive costs down is everywhere—in consumer products, financial services, tech companies, and yes, even in government. Given that context, we see the strong adoption of scalable, cost-efficient cloud computing infrastructure. The cloud has become a key tool to transform, be more agile, and gain efficiency.

Whether in government, financial services, oil and gas, or retail, cloud has become the new normal. Here are just a few examples of how organizations are driving growth, innovating, and reducing costs with the AWS Cloud:

• Capital One: From customer service delivery to data-enabled risk management, customers have high expectations for banking. Capital One chose AWS because it meets the high security standards of the financial-services industry, enables the bank to innovate in consumer banking, and delivers great digital experiences for Capital One’s millions of customers.

• McDonald’s: When choosing a fast-food restaurant, customers are looking for two things: quick service and good food. In order to better serve its 69 million customers each day, McDonald’s leveraged AWS to transform itself into a digital-technology company. By moving to the cloud, it has beat performance targets by up to 66 percent and completes 8,600 transactions per second via its point-of-sale system.

• GE Oil & Gas: As part of a major digital transformation to enable the century-old company to innovate and thrive in a digital economy, GE migrated 500 applications to AWS. Using AWS, GE Oil & Gas moved from a business that was grounded in legacy IT to an organization that is far more agile and cost efficient, and has seen a 98 percent reduction in impactful business outages and incidents.

Large, successful companies are choosing AWS for many reasons, but especially because of our unwavering commitment to building and operating a secure cloud. Security has always been our focus – and, of course, the focus of our public sector customers – from Day 1. Unfortunately, there used to be a widespread misperception that the cloud wasn’t secure. We spent a lot of time over the past several years listening to security concerns and demonstrating that we deliver security that is second to none.

This approach led us to create groundbreaking offerings like our AWS GovCloud (US) Region in 2011, C2S for the intelligence community, and more recently, our AWS Secret Region, which we announced last year. We also became the first commercial cloud provider to pursue and achieve a number of key security certifications, such as FedRAMP High.

Many of our customers will now tell you that they are more secure with commercial cloud, including Capital One’s CIO Rob Alexander, who has said, “We can provide higher security with AWS than with our own data centers.” Additionally, Sean Roche, Associate Deputy Director of CIA for Digital Innovation said, “The cloud, on its weakest day, is more secure.”

Just as we never compromise on privacy and security, we also have never compromised on innovation—and that’s another reason why organizations large and small value their relationship with AWS. Relentless innovation requires more than just a focus on product development. We work hard to adopt a “builder’s mindset” that encourages rapid experimentation. It’s that mindset—and the technology created by it—that will help to keep our government innovating on the mission of protecting and supporting citizens and warfighters.

Learn more about AWS in the public sector.

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