Providing immediate support today and operational resiliency for tomorrow

As head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) public sector Professional Services (ProServe) and solutions architecture, my team and I are fortunate to be able to help organizations design and travel an accelerated path to successful cloud adoption on AWS.

We are always inspired by how our customers are using our technologies to innovate, whether it’s a nonprofit using our artificial intelligence (AI) services to assist with improving maternal health in an emerging country or a large financial institution using advanced analytics to detect fraud and ensure investor protection and market integrity.

But today, our customers face a different challenge, one that carries a sense of urgency. Across thousands of customer engagements, our teams have seen common customer stressors including:

• Building comprehensive business plans for complex cloud migrations
• Continuously doing more with less
• Investigating and implementing new technologies
• Ensuring the highest levels of security and business continuity

These needs are both immediate and long term. Public sector organizations’ missions include communicating and maintaining social services like public safety, health and human services, and emergency services. To continue to meet their mission while balancing other stressors, many organizations are looking for immediate support, as they are overwhelmed with requests for greater community engagement in areas of health, finances, and municipal operations. At the same time, organizations are beginning to focus on longer term plans for operational resiliency and business continuity to prepare for future states of emergency.

Across numerous recent customer engagements, our teams have seen an increase in requests for support in four key use cases: remote workforce and productivity, citizen engagement, data management and analytics, and operational resilience and business continuity. Today I want to share a few stories of success where customers have implemented AWS services to address these use cases. They address four of the most urgent IT issues facing public sector customers in the crisis. Dive into these examples to help you think about what you can get started on today.

Remote workforce and productivity

Services and solutions that can help:

• Amazon WorkSpaces
• Amazon Chime
• Amazon AppStream 2.0

Listen to the podcast: Mission critical cloud: A chat with AWS leaders

Watch the video: The University of Virginia’s (UVA) McIntire School of Commerce turned to AWS to provide flexible, cost-efficient, virtual desktops to its students.

Watch the video: In Fife School Districts, while students automatically got access to some applications, there were certain program they couldn’t access, especially those used in CTE (Careers in Technical Education) classes. By using Amazon AppStream 2.0, Fife School District’s students can now access applications from anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Citizen engagement

Services and solutions that can help:

• Chatbots
• Amazon Connect
• Mobile apps

Read the blog: Chatbots and call centers: Connecting with citizens during critical times

Read the blog: Creating an outbound calling solution during a pandemic using Amazon Connect

Read the story: White House’s Office of Science and Technology Tele-Health Platform

Read the case study and watch the video: Los Angeles County discusses how AWS professional services helped build an omni-channel contact center to help reduce overall costs, while helping address growing call volumes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfBoQvAjKsc

Watch the video: The American Heart Association presents how they, together with AWS Professional Services, built an Amazon Lex bot for their catalog to help customers discover content more simply.

Data management and analytics

Services and solutions that can help:

• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Amazon Athena
• Amazon Kinesis
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon DynamoDB

Read the blog: A public data lake for analysis of COVID-19 data

Watch the video: UK National Health Services digital talks about the design and creation of a highly secure data environment on AWS allowing external researchers to securely access important data, while achieving 26x performance improvement in data processing time.

Operational resilience and business continuity

Services and solutions that can help:

• Process and systems modernization
• Disaster response/backup

Read the case study: The cloud helps Rhode Island manage an unprecedented surge in UI claims

Read the case study: Best Friends Animal Society accesses, analyzes, and backs up critical data in AWS to save lives

Whether you are planning a cloud migration or a cloud-native deployment, these initiatives can be challenging to implement during traditional times. But when you have to deploy key solutions with urgency, our team can help supplement your team with specialized skills and experience.

I encourage you to dive deep into the stories most relevant to you. And if you see a solution that could help you serve your organization’s mission, please reach out. The Professional Services and Solutions Architecture teams and I are here to help.

For more information, visit our public sector cloud webpages and use priority chat to start a discussion with our teams and let us assist your organization during this critical time.