Top announcements from the AWS Public Sector Partners leadership session at re:Invent 2021

During the 10^th anniversary of re:Invent, I was thrilled to share announcements and achievements from AWS Partners and programs for the public sector around the world. Since its launch, AWS’s Public Sector Partner Program participation has increased by an average of 54% year over year, with partners providing solutions in mission areas across healthcare, aerospace and satellite, energy, transportation, government, education, and nonprofit. In both the Global Partners Summit keynote and my public sector leadership session at re:Invent 2021, I highlighted the new and upcoming AWS Partner solutions and accomplishments that focused on destination, data, and delivery.

Here are the things you might have missed:

Launching programs and initiatives to accelerate partner innovation

Announcing AWS Mainframe Modernization
AWS Mainframe Modernization (M2) is now available to assist partners in migrating mainframe workloads to the cloud. AWS Partners Micro Focus and Blu Age provide toolchains that are provisioned in the M2 instance to cover the most common patterns of mainframe migration, re-platform, and refactor. Learn more.

Now available: AWS EHR Integrated Applications Migration Initiative
The AWS Electronic Health Record (EHR) Integrated Applications Migration Initiative is a healthcare-focused initiative, leveraging both existing and new programs to streamline healthcare application migration to AWS. Modern health systems require a community of integrated applications and AWS is systematically identifying and migrating these critical applications to the AWS Cloud to create a health system community of applications required to operate and transform healthcare delivery. This initiative provides our customers with a programmatic way to safely and securely migrate their EHR workloads to AWS with the confidence of knowing that hundreds of required applications already live there.

AWS delivers leading Epic database performance in cloud for healthcare
Epic is a critical application for healthcare organizations and Epic customers can leverage AWS services to lower costs and deploy releases faster for end user innovation. AWS has, again, increased scalability of global references per second (GRref/s) for Epic on AWS customers. This represents a 260% increase since being approved as a cloud provider for Epic customers in 2019. The AWS Cloud now addresses 90% of Epic customers. Learn more about these performance increases, which will benefit partners running on Epic and accelerate the time to value for all Epic deployments.

Market-ready, smart city IoT solutions
In July 2021, AWS launched the smart cities pilot under the AWS Internet of Things (IoT) Adoption Partner Program (IAPP) with 18 partners. This pilot was set up to curate, develop, and support strategic smart cities partners to innovate and sell their solutions on AWS. Now, it is a program that is a single source for AWS to recruit, develop, and go-to-market with smart cities partners. The program offers a strategic value proposition by combining technical and financial assistance with partner solution differentiation, targeted partner community building, and marketing and sales support. The program will be available in all of the Americas and Asia Pacific in early 2022.

Coming soon: The AWS Containers Rapid Adoption Assistance program
In Q1 2022, AWS is launching the AWS Containers Rapid Adoption Assistance (CRAA) program. The initiative will help public sector partners modernize and build critical applications with better portability, agility, security, and fault isolation. AWS CRAA will help scale partner capacity through a dedicated AWS team of subject matter experts (SMEs) that will lead partner workshops, help build business plans, and assist with proof-of-concepts. This hands-on guidance can add velocity to partners adopting Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and microservices-based architectures—helping partners rapidly deploy solutions that support complex missions around the world.

Announcing the AWS Data Led Migration (DLM) Rapid Adoption Assistance program
The AWS Data Led Migration (DLM) Rapid Adoption Assistance is an automated mechanism that connects partners with AWS subject matter experts who will help them scale their capacity for taking data from multiple on-premises sources and moving it to a data lake in the cloud. The hands-on guidance offered by the AWS DLM team helps partners accelerate data-led migrations and prepares them for applying analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) services to their customers’ data—speeding up the time-to-value of smarter decision-making and improving constituent services. Learn more.

Announcing the global availability of the AWS Energy Competency
The AWS Energy Competency is now globally available. Through this competency, customers gain access to highly specialized, trusted AWS Partners who have demonstrated repeat success enabling energy customers to leverage technology to drive efficiency in the operation of oil and gas assets, while positioning operators for the transition to a lower carbon future. The AWS Energy Competency showcases AWS Consulting and Technology Partners who have demonstrated their expertise supporting energy customers by undergoing a rigorous validation process, including a third-party technical review and customer reference audit. Read more.

Six partners to provide data led migrations private offers on AWS Marketplace
Six data led migration (DLM) private offers are available now on the AWS Marketplace from AWS Partners Presidio, SMX, Nephos, Mobilise, Enquizit, and Keyrus. These solutions support our customers to migrate their data to cloud and use analytics, AI, and ML services for real time decision making. AWS Consulting Partners will provide bundled DLM private offers focused on assessments, implementations, managed services, and premium support to the customers. Additionally, AWS Technology Partners will work with partner product teams to integrate analytics and ML services into partner solutions. The bundled private offers of partner solutions, coupled with AWS Professional Services, will be available at special pricing terms that are not publicly available to the customers.

AWS AI enables Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) for public sector partners and customers
Public sector organizations and partners are overloaded with the high volume of processing physical documents. Extracting data from unstructured or semi-structured handwritten documents continues to be time-consuming, error-prone, expensive, and difficult to scale. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a solution that enables extraction and processing of specific data elements from documents using AI and ML techniques. The AWS IDP stack provides several services related to classification, extraction, human augmentation, and enterprise search with pre-trained deep learning models readily available to be integrated into your IDP solution. AWS Partners are currently taking this offering to market for the purpose of reducing customer operational cost for extracting and analyzing text, images, and rich data from claims, forms, and identity documents. Learn more.

Think Big for Small Business Communities to increase small business engagement
To support AWS Partners in the Think Big for Small Business (TBSB) program, AWS is launching TBSB Communities. TBSB Communities is a peer-to-peer and AWS-led forum to educate, inform, and enable collaboration among public sector serving small and minority-owned business partner community. TBSB Communities will focus on investing in and building a thriving community of small and minority-owned business partners that are able to grow a strong business with AWS. Various communities will be geographically established to offer locally relevant support that accounts for the diverse needs of partners across the globe.

AWS Government Competency Enhancement
In 2022, AWS will launch the AWS Government Competency Enhancement. This enhancement will have a specific focus on federal partners. These partners have demonstrated experience in delivering quality solutions to help agencies meet mandates, reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and increase innovation across US federal, civilian, defense, and intelligence communities. Members will get access to federal-specific partner advisory council events to help forge relationships within federal partners as well as additional public recognition for federally-focused partners.

Celebrating partner accomplishments

AWS Partners leverage AWS GovCloud (US) for DoD IL5 authorization
The Department of Defense (DoD) defines Impact Level 5 (IL5) as having the ability to accommodate controlled unclassified information (CUI) that requires a higher level of protection. As of today, AWS has 98 services authorized for use at IL5. Today, there are six partners operating systems at IL5 — Diligent, GDIT, PTC Cloud Services, Splunk, Zscaler, Splunk, Palantir — with more to come. To host these IL5 workloads, AWS Partners used AWS GovCloud (US).

Esri integrates with Amazon Redshift to expand geodata analysis
Esri and AWS have collaborated to extend ArcGIS to Amazon Redshift. Customers can now quickly access and store their geospatial SQL query data using Amazon Redshift and integrate Amazon QuickSight for intelligent data analytics inclusive of base maps. This new capability enables higher performance and support for bigger data, allowing customers to easily analyze their GIS data and cloud-native databases together. The integration increases the volume and the speed at which a user can analyze multiple sets of spatial data. Learn more about how Esri expands geodata analysis here.

IronNet announcing statewide cyber threat detection and response capability for State of New York
IronNet is announcing a partnership with the New York Port Authority (NYPA), the nation’s largest state public power organization, to secure the state’s public energy ecosystem. Supplying utility services to more than 50 municipalities and cooperatives, NYPA worked with IronNet to launch the New York State Cybersecurity Collective Defense Consortium (CCDC) to strengthen the state’s ability to protect the grid through a unified cyber defense strategy. CCDC will connect more than 50 municipal utilities and cooperatives within New York to detect and defend against cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. The CCDC can share anonymized threat information at network speed to create a dynamic, radar-like view of their cybersecurity landscape.

African Leadership Group to establish global recruitment solution and train top African talent worldwide for cloud computing careers
The African Leadership Group (ALG) announced a commitment to create a scalable talent matching solution to connect global talent to in-demand technical careers. The ALG is an institution with a mission to identify and develop new talent that will bolster workforce readiness and proficiencies, equip talent with best-in-class IT skills, and advance personal financial and economic growth. AWS, in collaboration with the ALG, will power The Room Intelligence Platform (TRIP) talent matching solution and offer cloud training curriculum. Learn more.

Presidio launches CPC Ransomware Mitigation Kit and manage, detect, and response solution
Cloud Endure, Presidio & Crowdstrike (CPC) have partnered to create a ransomware mitigation kit that provides a recovery and protection strategy that covers the five pillars of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework. The objective of the CPC Mitigation Kit is to quickly detect and prevent ransomware attacks leveraging community immunity, enabling public sector organizations to swiftly respond and mitigate attacks, prevent lateral spread, and restore business operations through backup recovery, increased business resiliency, and operational efficiencies. Learn more about the CPC Mitigation Kit, as well as Presidio’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution.

GE Healthcare launches workflow automation tool for radiology
EDISON TRUE PACS from GE Healthcare is a solution that provides new intelligent workflow design and configuration capabilities, streamlining radiology workflows on AWS. In addition, EDISON provides AI diagnostic algorithms to compliment the expertise of radiology teams in image analysis and diagnosis. With these new capabilities, GE has tested TRUE PACS with radiologists and reports 90% faster workflows with a 20% gain in diagnostic accuracy.

Genomics announcement by UK Biobank and DNANexus, powered by AWS
The UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (RAP) enables researchers working with UK Biobank’s large-scale biomedical database and research resource, to access it in the cloud from anywhere in the world. Enabled by DNANexus technology and powered by AWS, RAP exponentially increases the accessibility of biomedical data by helping researchers around the world advance their understanding of human disease. RAP has been designed to accommodate the vast and increasing scale of the UK Biobank resource— helping research organizations explore and analyze UK Biobank’s trove of phenotypic, genomic, imaging, and health record data, derived from 500,000 volunteer participants.

Announcing our AWS Public Sector Consulting Partner of the Year: Leidos
Leidos is a $12.3 billion technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world’s toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, civil, and health markets. Extensive capabilities in digital modernization, cybersecurity, mission software, integrated systems, mission operations, and enabling technologies such as AI/ML demonstrates their AWS Premier Consulting Partner expertise. Leidos holds five AWS Competencies, four AWS Partner programs, and has a mission to make the world safer, healthier, and more efficient.

Announcing our AWS Public Sector Technology Partner of the Year: SAP NS2
SAP NS2 is an ISV Advance Tier Partner with competencies in data and analytics, government, and is in the AWS GovCloud (US) delivery program. SAP NS2 offers SAP applications, analytics, database, cyber security, and cloud software solutions with specialized levels of security and support to meet the unique requirements of US federal, defense, aerospace, and critical infrastructure companies.

Check out more AWS Public Sector Partner stories and read other stories from Sandy Carter.

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