Election day has come, and it has gone, with a few states still counting votes, the projected President-elect is Joseph R. Biden, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris making history as the first African and Asian American women to be elected to higher office. However, just because the election is over does not mean that the task of securing the U.S. elections infrastructure stops; in fact, the work must continue. 

This will be the first in what DLT intends to be an ongoing series of posts highlighting what our partners are building for the Public Sector using AWS. 

The Challenge
A Global Service provider wanted a way to develop a messaging solution, to augment, marketing and sales teams for promoting events using a standard Calendar Invite.

In previous years you would have ventured to our nation’s Capital to take part in the AWS Public Sector Summit. This year’s event – as you could imagine – was a virtual experience. Although I and my fellow DLT colleagues wished we could have been there in person, we really enjoyed our time at this year’s Summit. Much like what has been the theme of 2020, AWS had to adapt and innovate to these unprecedented times. They certainly rose to the occasion and put together a unique and valuable experience for their attendees.

The delivery of technology, solutions, and services through the cloud brings a wealth of opportunities for the public sector. But for many of our channel partners, helping their government customers achieve their mission objectives via cloud services can be complex and challenging. And this can compromise business growth and profitability.

That’s why we created DLT Cloud Navigator™.

In less than two weeks the DLT team will be attending the annual AWS Public Sector Summit. Like other high-profile gatherings forced to adapt to the ongoing remote lifestyle, this year’s summit will be virtual. Even as a digital experience, I don’t expect this year’s event to be any less impactful.

Although cloud adoption in government is growing, it can be a challenging technology to envision. Many cloud deployments don’t go as planned, take longer than expected to implement, or fail completely. In the private sector, studies suggest that 74% of those organizations that move an application to the cloud moved it back into their own infrastructure.

The use of facial recognition software to support law enforcement efforts is nothing new – in the movies that is. In 1997, the sci-fi classic The Fifth Element equipped its futuristic airborne police vehicles with tools that let officers compare facial scans of the movie’s mysterious alien heroine to a central criminal database in the hope of making an identification.

Twenty years on, scenarios like this are fast becoming normalized.

How secure is your user access to AWS infrastructure and workloads? Security to protect every user’s access to apps, endpoints and infrastructure when moving to the cloud is a hot topic. AWS’ shared responsibility model means that security and compliance is just that, shared between AWS and the customer.

No sooner do you have your arms around one cybersecurity vulnerability then another surfaces. This time it’s Meltdown and Spectre, both of which can cause data leak from kernel memory. These vulnerabilities are particularly worrying since they impact practically all computers and involve multiple IT vendors including processor players Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and ARM.

Intel agencies and other government organizations that deal with secret-level datasets, now have access to a “secret” cloud data center region – the AWS Secret Region. With the launch of this region, DLT partner, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.