Tag: government

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, cell towers, power lines, and telephone and internet cable are often damaged or destroyed, limiting the ability for responders to share data and access the internet. The AWS Disaster Response team conducted a field testing operation designed to replicate a common disaster response scenario, to show how to establish an ad-hoc network at field sites with limited connectivity and create a link to an office headquarters to provide access to cloud-based resources and data to responders in the field.

Accreditation programs and the organizational models that support them are priority considerations for public sector managers who are modernizing their IT. But managers often consider risk and compliance issues too late in the planning stage. Here are some key principles that can prevent accreditation-related issues from becoming a roadblock to cloud adoption.

Freight transportation companies and logistics service providers are being challenged by spikes in e-commerce volume. The need for real-time, dynamic re-adjustment of global supply chains has shortened planning cycles from weeks to hours, and requires faster IT workloads, quicker access to data, increased ability to innovate, and more. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and cloud technologies can help by bringing cost-effectiveness, scalability, elasticity, and agility to freight and people transportation systems.

Government agencies are moving to speed up service delivery, but agencies need to obtain an Authority to Operate (ATO) that demonstrates security compliance prior to implementation, which can take a significant amount of time and can prove to be a challenge in meeting tight deadlines. AWS Partner Booz Allen Hamilton (Booz Allen) uses a platform as a service model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable their customers to rapidly build, test, scan, and deploy their applications — accelerating releases in the federal government from months to days.

Governments have similar problems and are not in competition, so using technology that others have developed and made freely available via open source to transform essential services makes sense. To make open source solutions easier to find for governments, AWS recently created an online repository: Open Government Solutions.

Constituents rely on state and local government leaders to create resilient transportation networks for every part of their lives. Transportation resilience requires digital technology infrastructure that is also resilient in the face of potential disaster. This is why state and local governments are turning to the cloud.

Learn how you can build a foundation of security objectives practices, including a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, that can be adapted to meet a dynamic policy environment and support the missions of national computer security incident response teams (CSIRT), operators of essential services (OES), digital service providers (DSP), and other identified sector organizations.

After a multi-year journey working with the mission critical application technology providers and Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) officials across the US, Amazon Web Services (AWS) implemented a simple and technically robust approach to CJIS compliance. Now, agencies and organizations in all 50 states in the US can host criminal justice information (CJI) on AWS.

Recent events, from public sector cyberattacks and severe weather events to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, have revealed that many educational institutions, as well as regional and local governments, are not fully prepared to respond to these incidents. At the same time, large-scale disruptive events illustrate how important it is for public sector organizations to respond rapidly to keep essential services running as well as quickly pivot to offer new services. In an IDC survey of 2,000 U.S. residents in September 2020, 31% said they would like to continue virtual government services as a replacement for in-person interactions, while another IDC survey of U.S. teachers revealed that 38% expect a growth in hybrid or remote learning to be a lasting change.

Information technology and cloud services can be enablers for modernization of these business processes and tax systems, and improved constituent experience. For public administrators, these tools can also shorten the window between the enactment of a new law and its timely and successful implementation. Here’s how governments are addressing some major challenges using the AWS Cloud.