A new, sustainable path for public sector leaders

The future of digital government in the cloud

Rapid change is underway in the world of digital government. From projects that help urban infrastructure scale for commuters to finding new homes for orphaned refugees. From new solutions that ensure election platforms are resilient to making weather forecasts available 24/7– and more. Today, governments can harness the power of the cloud to offer citizens easier access to services and improve their quality of life.

In this eBook, you’ll learn how the cloud is being used to help solve all sorts of challenges, and in doing so, we hope you’ll find inspiration to begin your own journey.

Let’s get started.

Welcome

OverviewTransportation: Supporting a world on the move

Elections: Results with resilience

Tourism: New opportunities in the cloud

Meteorology: The power of data against the elements

Courts and prisons: Justice for all

Safety and security: A future powered by the cloud

Citizen services: Improving quality of life

Get in touch: Find out how to start your journey

Innovative Travel Solutions (ITS) is an independent business unit within Vancouver International Airport (YVR), and it’s currently the largest provider of self-service border-control kiosks across Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Their solution has helped more than 100 million passengers clear the border quickly and safely.

As the company grew rapidly, it needed to be able to scale its technology quickly and securely. “We researched different cloud technologies, but Amazon was the clear industry leader,” said Linda Schucroft, director of innovative travel solutions at Vancouver International Airport. “They offered a simpler progression from on premises to the cloud, and they provided the best global coverage and support.”

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Digital border control: Vancouver International Airport

Transportation: Supporting a world on the move

100 million passengers served

24/7 availability

Porto is a coastal city in northwest Portugal with over 250,000 citizens and 1.8 million inhabitants in the surrounding area covering more than 2,000 square kilometres. Already a hub for exports, research, and technology, the city wanted to build on its reputation as an innovator.

As part of this, it created a network across 400+ public service vehicles, and working with AWS partner Veniam, transformed them into mobile hotspots and urban sensors. This increased both the range and quality of free public internet, and gave the city real-time insights into passenger movement, wait times, and more.

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Transportation: Supporting a world on the move

The IoT innovator: City of Porto

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore is a government agency responsible for all land transport development, policies, and enforcement. Moving over 2.2 million users a day, LTA needed a faster, cheaper way to respond to public feedback. With AWS, it quickly rolled out scaled hosting services to meet its needs.

The programme not only complied with strict security policies, but also generated a 60 percent saving on costs and even allowed the organisation to run simulations with 100,000 users and receive a response in record time–just three seconds.

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Scaling to the needs of 2.2 million commuters

1.8 million inhabitants in surrounding area

400+ public service vehicles

60% saving on costs

100,000 users received a response in 3 seconds

Agentschap Wegen and Verkeer (AWV) is the government agency responsible for 6,970km of roads and 7,668km of cycle lanes in Belgium. Using AWS, it complies with the latest data protection regulations while embracing quicker development and roll-outs of digital tools for its inspectors on the road. Among these are apps that can do things like monitoring traffic flow and registering potholes. By using AWS, AWV can now develop and test features three times faster, has reduced system admin time by 67 percent, and halved costs. Read more

Spotlight on Belgium: Building and maintaining

Reduced admin time by 67%

Maintaining 6,970km of roads and 7,668 km of cycle lanes

Transportation: Supporting a world on the move

In 2016, the Italian city of Cagliari in southern Sardinia implemented a new portal to provide citizens with real-time access to local election results.

These remained accessible to the general public even during peak traffic surges: On election night itself, more than seven million requests were successfully served, as the system automatically scaled to demand. This was all achieved cost-effectively and quickly–from idea to execution took just 20 days.

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Elections: Results with resilienceItaly rises to a local challenge

7 million requests processedin one night

20 days from start to delivery

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is responsible for conducting federal elections and referendums and maintaining the Commonwealth electoral roll. Through cloud innovation, it can now respond to the demands on its many websites, online services, and applications, as well as record enrollment rates and mobile participants.

The highly secure, scalable, and flexible solution responds rapidly to the peak-capacity demands, even during an election period, when hits frequently exceed 100 million. Such innovation has empowered the AEC to better serve the Australian public, both now and in the future.

Find out more

Australia scales to manage 100 million+ hits

Over 100 million web visits on election night

Wonderful Copenhagen (WC) uses the AWS Cloud to help it better understand visitors to the Danish capital, and in turn, inspire them with new tourist experiences across the city. WC works with more than 300 tourist attractions, tour operators, restaurants, theatres, and other partners to develop the tourism industry in and around the city.

Combining internal data with publicly available information, such as weather patterns, WC is able to develop a detailed picture of tourism patterns. The project will ultimately trace entire tourist seasons, identify bottlenecks and opportunities, and help deliver data-driven value to partners.

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Denmark: A tourism data trove unlocked

Tourism: New opportunities in the cloud

300+ tourist attractions

6% increase in tourism every year

Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) is the German National

Meteorological Service, responsible for monitoring national

weather. In 2018, it added its weather models to the AWS

Public Datasets program. This program covers the cost

of storage for public datasets and makes it available for

analysis on AWS, allowing researchers to analyse data

without needing to pay to store their own copy.

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Open data in Germany

Meteorology: The power of data against the elements

The Met Office is the UK’s national weather service. A

world leader of accuracy in forecasting, it uses more than

300 million daily weather observations, an advanced

atmospheric model and two supercomputers to create

tailored forecasts and briefings each day. With the

cloud, it can serve this data to customers in seconds,

not minutes, as well as help enable the release of new

applications more frequently.

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Forecasts in seconds

300 million daily weather observations

Data storage scales by 1000%

The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) provides research and

safety functions for Finland. It uses the cloud to distribute open

data, as well as operate data services with higher availability

and scalability–especially useful given heavy demands

prompted by the country’s extreme weather. It has also

launched an online portal that allows anyone to download its

open data for analysis.

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The sky is the limit for data distribution

More on open dataOver 300 million transactions

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in the UK uses technology to help make justice fairer, more effective, and more accessible. Switching to a cloud solution allowed the ministry to automate the delivery of services and consolidate work methods.

Today, more than 20 MoJ digital services now live in the AWS Cloud, prompting a cultural shift towards agile development and operations (DevOps). This now underpins the MoJ’s ability to deliver services to citizens or civil servants rapidly, analyse data about how people use the

services, adapt it to their needs, and build more effective solutions.

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Making justice more accessible for UK citizens

Courts and Prisons: Justice for all

SecureAppbox helps organisations manage sensitive data and comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In 2015, an unprecedented 60,000 child refugees entered Sweden without parents, following crises in the Middle East. Using AWS, Secureappbox and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting (SKL) built a platform–in just eight weeks–to help give these orphans a safe, secure future.

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Rehoming child refugees in Sweden

Safety and security: A future powered by the cloud

Easy communication at scale, “burner” phones, and simple photo-editing tools are just some of the digital exploits used by traffickers to operate anonymously. Especially those who traffic children for sex online. But now a product called Spotlight uses sophisticated machine learning to fight back, automatically flagging ads likely to represent at-risk children. Since 2016, Spotlight has helped officers in the United States and Canada open more than 21,000 trafficking cases and identify about 18,000 victims, including more than 6,000 children.

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Thorn: Identifying child-trafficking victims faster

Start to go-live in 8 weeks

60,000 orphaned refugees

Identified 18,000 victims, including over 6,000 children

Opened 21,000 trafficking cases

Launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) in India,

the Smart Cities Missions (SCM) aims to develop 100 smart cities to

drive economic growth and improve life. As part of this, The India Urban

Observatory was set up to gather and store data in the cloud, both from

real-time and archival sources, in order to help develop paths to clean,

sustainable environments using technology. The scalable platform took

them from 500 to 500,000 datasets and now provides invaluable insight for

the 100 cities that will change India’s future.

Realizing a vision for improving cities in India

Citizen services: Improving quality of life

from 500 to 500,000 datasets

100 smart cities across India

Common Service Centres (CSC), who act as access points to

government of India digital services, turned to AWS to find accessible,

cost-effective, and scalable solutions. By bringing these services to

rural and remote locations, CSC helps to make the country a more

digitally and financially inclusive society. With a cloud solution now

in place, these vital services can be reached by a greater number of

people and paves the way for innovation, giving those in remote

areas access to new technology that benefits all.

Find out more

Connecting communities in rural India

The government of Ontario looks after healthcare, education, transportation, and the environment in the east-central Canadian province. To ensure information and services were accessible on the government website by its 14 million inhabitants, they turned to the cloud. The site immediately stopped going down, a disaster-recovery solution was gained, and it could scale as required. Teams are also now able to experiment, learn, and make iterative changes to the site easier and faster than ever before.

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Citizen services: Improving quality of life

A new age of cloud creativity in Canada

Bahrain’s Information and eGovernment Authority (iGA) maintains the infrastructure and security of public sector technology. Despite a heritage of innovation, the iGA was spending 70 percent of its time buying and installing systems.

Today, having moved to the cloud, the iGA can innovate efficiently. Changes that previously would have taken two years are now launched in weeks. They have also created a state-of-the-art marketplace that is flexible enough to accommodate any international company and help stimulate local startups, aiding their mission to assist the wellbeing of society.

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Innovation in Bahrain

14 million inhabitants

Our global infrastructure

The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable Cloud Computing environment anywhere, on and off the planet. Whether you need to deploy your application workloads across the globe in a single click, or you want to build and deploy specific applications closer to your end users with single-digit millisecond latency, AWS provides you the cloud infrastructure where and when you need it.

With millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally, AWS has the largest and most dynamic ecosystem. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including start-ups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on AWS.

Learn more about our global infrastructure of AWS Regions and Availability Zones in more detail—and find out what offerings are available at all AWS locations.

Read our AWS public sector blog

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