Moving applications from a static environment to a more dynamic one, like the cloud, has implications around the application architecture, how the application is deployed and how the supporting compute is managed and maintained.

In a recent panel discussion, while moving mission-critical applications will ultimately reap big rewards for federal agencies, leaders from AWS and Slalom discuss the challenges that need to be overcome when they rebuild complex applications, connected to multiple vendors.

“For the past four years, I’ve been working on a program where an agency lifted and shifted a 20-year-old application into the cloud and had begun modernizing it around the edges of the application. They had multiple vendors doing pieces of that; [Slalom] came in and took over that entire ecosystem and saw that legacy environment was still holding the application’s core functionality,” says Rob Cummings, senior director for platform engineering at Slalom.

“Deployments on it took weeks; it would take days to deploy a single environment if everything worked right. It was challenging,” Cummings adds.

“The applications that agencies need to build today are vastly different from that in the past; they need to scale quickly to potentially millions of users, manage petabytes of data, and respond in milliseconds,” says Rahman Imtranur, senior solutions architecture, worldwide sector team at AWS.

“On the other hand, agencies are running their mission-critical workload on legacy systems—facing high costs and skill shortages. Application modernization has become essential for organizations of all sizes, and it’s key to helping them achieve their mission to deliver service faster and drive innovation for their constituents,” says Imtranur.

Imtranur shares how the pandemic was an accelerator of modern cloud-native applications, “agencies that embraced AWS and cloud proved more responsive; they could continue operating remotely and serving the customer demonstrating agility, scalability and speed.”

Cummings offers agencies advice as they look forward to modernization efforts and says, “If you have a 20-year-old application or an older application that is customer-facing and mission-critical to your agency, and it is something you want to continue to support and enhance, it’s time to look at modernizing that.”

“Whether [application modernization happens] as part of shifting to the cloud or immediately after, that’s going to be needed to get the benefits that the dynamic and scalable nature of the cloud can give you. It also will give you access to a greater pool of talent from the commercial space.”

Watch the full panel to hear more about leveraging the cloud to modernize applications.

You can also hear more from other government leaders about driving cloud-first strategies in the public sector.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

The post Leveraging the cloud to modernize applications appeared first on FedScoop.

While the cloud promises a lot in terms of cost savings, scalability, high security and ability, government agencies may not feel like they are getting the full value of those benefits for their mission. One of the key challenges that large federal agencies face is making data accessible to a wide variety of authorized users so that they can aggregate that data in different ways.

In a recent panel discussion, AWS enterprise strategist Zak Kelly and Ventech Solutions CTO Steve Veneruso discuss how working together is helping to facilitate federal agencies’ implementation of modern capabilities like artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mesh to federate and democratize data to authorized users.

Veneruso mentions Ventech’s work with one of the primary centers at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to replace original network design and third-party vendors with native AWS services and better leverage these modern capabilities in addition to bringing significant cost savings for the agency.

Veneruso explains that even though the company has high-end network architects and engineers, AWS brings a different level of technical expertise to certain cloud projects given their deep level of experience on the platform. Being able to lean on AWS experts during key periods of a project “is how a transition could go off seamlessly and be extremely valuable to capture those savings much more quickly,” says Veneruso.

Kelly further explains how Ventech is leveraging an AWS machine learning technology — called Amazon SageMaker — to build the algorithms that solve real health sciences problems. That work is supported through a carefully constructed and intentional partnership with AWS to ensure all stakeholders get the most from their cloud environment.

Kelly says, “AWS makes sure that [our] contractor partner is empowered and has the most skills to do the best for their customer using AWS technologies. So partners are very important to help federal customers get the most from cloud, and help federal customers have the best choice of partners.”

Watch the full panel to hear more about improve data and image analysis with cloud. You can also hear more from other government leaders about driving cloud-first strategies in the public sector.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

The post The power of collaboration to improve federal data accessibility in the cloud appeared first on FedScoop.

Government and public sector organizations need more resources to accomplish complex missions. While many have made notable progress in adopting cloud technologies, there are a variety of practices that could help agencies capitalize on the cloud faster.

In a recent FedScoop panel discussion, IBM Partner Kevin Aylward highlights examples of best practices and where and how those practices made a meaningful difference to agencies attempting to migrate into the cloud.

“Several agencies have taken the approach of building platform capabilities that embrace the open architectures that both AWS and IBM support and become a de facto platform for building new cloud-scale applications on, so that is one pattern we see quite a bit of,” he says.

Hiram Perez, senior partner development manager at AWS, also joined the discussion to share recommendations for ensuring success when taking on a transformation project such as cloud migrations.

“Make sure that you inform yourself before doing any major transformation. These are large and can be very complex. So, before you decide on something you want to do, take time to understand the information. And what I like to suggest to the agencies is to use the RFI process. I think it’s a great ability that agencies have to use [RFI] to find out exactly what’s going on out there—ask industry, ask companies on best processes,” Perez says,

Perez and Aylward also talk about, despite sometimes being viewed as competitors, AWS and IBM are working together to help government organizations advance their missions.

Listen to the complete panel discussion to learn about the most significant opportunities for government agencies to leverage the cloud even further.

You can also hear more from other government leaders about driving cloud-first strategies in the public sector.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

The post Leading practices in moving to the cloud for civilian agencies appeared first on FedScoop.

Government and public sector organizations face unique challenges in accomplishing complex missions with limited resources. Fortunately, advances in cloud computing make capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning more accessible to the public sector to help them better serve U.S. citizens.

FedScoop recently spoke with experts from AWS and Deloitte to discuss how federal agencies are driving cloud-first strategies to take advantage of AI and ML capabilities.

Raj Kadiyala, global worldwide public sector lead and AI/ML specialist at AWS, highlights several examples of agencies that have leveraged Amazon solutions to enable AI/ML capabilities.

“AWS has a dynamic community of customers and over 100,000 partners across 150 countries,” says Kadiyala, including system integrators, like Deloitte, that are building every imaginable use case on AWS that there is.

Monica McEwen, managing director of strategy and analytics at Deloitte Consulting, explains that in her discussions with clients, she often gets questions about how AI applies to a government mission.  

“They’re a little bit scared of the impact that AI might have. But AI is here. We’re all using it in our consumer lives today and I think there’s an incredible opportunity to drive increased mission effectiveness by leveraging AI,” she explains.

McEwen says Deloitte is focused on helping government agencies build AI fluency and prepare their data to take greater advantage of these capabilities.

She explains that “cloud is really supporting a lot of the requirements coming out of things like the Federal Data Strategy and the executive order on digital transformation in government. And as a result, we’re seeing a lot of government agencies start to think about their cloud strategy at a much more granular level.”

“I think overall what we’re seeing is just this huge acceleration in folks leveraging cloud to migrate their infrastructure,” she says. “And now they’re getting into cloud data modernization, which is, ‘how do we now migrate our legacy applications to a cloud-based environment to enable AI and ML?’”

Listen to the full panel discussion to learn more about leveraging the cloud to harness the power of analytics, automation and AI.

You can also hear more from other government leaders about driving cloud-first strategies in the public sector.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

The post Public sector’s innovative use cases in analytics, AI and ML appeared first on FedScoop.

Government and public sector organizations face unique challenges to accomplish complex missions with limited resources. One of those challenges is how to harness the rapidly growing amount of modern satellite imagery and sensor data for public sector uses.

In a recent FedScoop panel discussion, Jon Love, vice president of strategic growth at Maxar — a major provider of commercial satellite imagery to the U.S. government — discusses how modern cloud capabilities are improving not just the amount of data satellites collect, the quality of images they provide as well.

Clouds in the atmosphere make it harder to collect data, according to Love, but a technology that has quickly evolved is the ability to combine electro-optical, or camera imagery, along with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and even radio frequency data to improve the situational awareness of what is occurring on Earth.

And once that data is collected, an agile and elastic cloud can help organizations “churn through a lot of data” — both SAR and electro-optical — to perform object detection “at a scale that they’ve never done before,” shared Brandon Miller, senior account manager for Maxar at AWS.

But perhaps equally importantly, he added, the ability to scale up and scale down a cloud environment quickly also means agencies can do this “efficiently, effectively and at the right cost.”

Watch the full panel to hear more about improve data and image analysis with cloud.

You can also hear more from other government leaders about driving cloud-first strategies in the public sector.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

The post Using cloud to harness satellite imagery and sensor data for public sector use appeared first on FedScoop.

Government organizations face unique challenges trying to accomplish complex missions with limited resources — especially when logistics play a central role in those missions.

Fortunately, data processing capabilities now available through cloud computing are helping public sector officials overcome some of those challenges and implement more effective ways to serve citizens, according to logistics and IT specialists from Leidos and Amazon Web Services in a new FedScoop interview.

“We’re in a state where we want resiliency in everything we do,” says Amy Freeman, chief technology officer for logistics and mission support operation at Leidos. From a supply chain perspective, that means helping federal customers “to operate through whatever is thrown at them… and still meet their mission.”

That calls in part for collaborating with a wider circle of industry partners, like Amazon Web Services, she says.

AWS’s Samir Mehta agrees. Mehta, who serves as principal business development manager, operations and maintenance, describes how collaborating with Leidos has “allowed us to learn about Leidos’s deep expertise in supplying support for logistics” to the International Space Station, to bases in Antarctica, and to supporting governments around the world. “We’ve been able to think hard about data, and infrastructure as a common thread, to support that world,” he says.

In the interview, Freeman and Mehta discuss how cloud-enabled artificial intelligence, machine learning and enhanced security are helping to accelerate logistical decision making, and improve agility, at federal agencies. And they offer their views on where they see the biggest opportunities for agencies to leverage the cloud even further.

Learn more about leveraging the cloud to build resiliency in logistics.

You can also hear more from other government leaders about driving cloud-first strategies in the public sector.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

The post How the cloud helps make logistics more resilient appeared first on FedScoop.