2020 was a transformative year for public sector IT. Accelerated by necessity, agencies rapidly scaled and secured their digital ecosystems to accommodate a newly remote workforce. Against this backdrop, significant cybersecurity hacks revealed continued vulnerabilities in the federal supply chain and state and local IT infrastructures.

Looking forward there is much work to be done. A new administration, new regulations and continued reliance on the cloud will shape public sector IT through 2021.

Teresa Carlson, Vice President, AWS Public Sector held a leadership session, From complexity to clarity: The strategic value of AWS. Teresa’s breakout highlighted how crucial cloud technology has been for organizations. The AWS cloud provides the ability to respond quickly to the new reality brought on by the ongoing global crisis. Several AWS customers shared how they were able to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges using the cloud. Furthermore, how they are driving impact around big ideas, discoveries, and turning points to solve some of the world’s largest challenges.

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.

Before reading this month's Thought Light interview, we invite you to read about BMC's multi/hybrid cloud initiatives for federal government, click here. 

What is BMC and how does it help the public sector?

Cloud governance shouldn’t be an afterthought. Indeed, it should be a foundational element of any cloud security strategy. Why? Because the cloud is enormous – it’s software, hardware, developer tools and platforms, and more. All delivered by a host of vendors.

It has been 10 years since the U.S. government began warming to cloud computing, beginning with the federal Cloud First initiative in 2010 leading to today’s Cloud Smart strategy – a game plan for bringing processes and applications into a new hardware environment.

But to take advantage full advantage of a cloud-driven ecosystem, the government must have more than just a cloud strategy. Agencies also need a data strategy.

What is a cloud data strategy?

It’s often said that there are two types of organizations: those that have been hacked, and those that will be – turning the conversations around security breaches from ‘what if?’ to ‘when?’.

Key takeaways show how public sector customers are achieving more with cloud.

As cloud continues to transform the public sector, cloud has had its own metamorphosis: from a trendy buzz word to a catalyst for meaningful change, innovation, and more. Last month, AWS hosted its 10^th annual AWS Public Sector Summit. The conference brought together more than 17,000 attendees for 2+ days of insights, sessions, and networking, and explored how cloud is fueling the public sector for a limitless future.

Recap

The AWS Public Sector Summit is just around the corner. Part of a global series of summits, this year’s event in Washington, D.C. brings the public sector cloud community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. DLT will be exhibiting at the Summit this year with its technology vendors including AWS, Crowdstrike, NetApp, Quest, and more in booth #800.

Federal agencies are using multiple public clouds in addition to on-premises private and non-cloud infrastructures. This mutli-cloud adoption is creating increasingly complex environments and making it difficult to manage and protect data. Without proper data management, hybrid and multi-cloud environments can quickly become just another series of expensive and risky silos. All cloud migration strategies should encompass data management best practices to maximize cloud adoption benefits while minimizing risk.