The AWS Cloud Ecosystem: Public Sector Summit Highlights

It has been a busy month in the cloud world, particularly in the public sector. CloudCheckr was fortunate enough to attend and sponsor a few significant shows for the federal and government cloud space, including AWS Public Sector Summit. While there were many important presentations and conversations throughout the week, one of the most interesting was the series of opening keynotes.
 

Cloud Ecosystem Evolution

Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, opened with an inspiring keynote. As Teresa explained, with thousands of customers, premier consulting partners, system integrators, and ISVs, the AWS public sector landscape is enormous—and rapidly growing. Since last year, many more workloads have continued to deploy in AWS. The past year has seen the rollout of AWS Government Competency program, GovCloud Skills program, and Public Sector Partner program—amounting to nearly 500 partners in the first year alone. This year, the introduction of the AWS Education Competency program is only going to expand this booming public sector cloud ecosystem.
In particular, integrations and collaboration among AWS partners is spurring advancements in this ecosystem. Teresa, reflecting on the Summit’s partner breakout session, noted that most of the partners said they were using CloudCheckr in particular.
As she explained, it’s clear that AWS partners are truly beginning to come together and join in this growth.
Notable Numbers:

• 135,000 active users in the AWS marketplace
• 3,800+ software listings in the marketplace
• 1,200+ ISVs
• 185% compounded annual growth in GovCloud workloads

This last statistic, especially, highlights the rapidly proliferating public sector landscape. As more organizations move to the public cloud, more compliance-regulated workloads like HIPAA and FedRAMP are part of the equation. This momentum was validated by the announcement of the GovCloud US East region, meaning even faster, more reliable public cloud infrastructure in the future for federal and government AWS users.
 

Public Cloud is the “New Norm”

Werner Vogels, the CTO of AWS, also commented on the shifting tone surrounding the public cloud. As “the new norm,” he said, more government organizations have already recognized the great potential for increased cost efficiency, security, availability, and performance with AWS. Now, developers feel liberated, with increased productivity and agility to build new capabilities and functionality. Werner underscored this point: “AWS gives developers superpowers to succeed.” As he explained, protecting customers is the first and foremost priority of AWS. Therefore, AWS makes investments to stay in front of the dynamic cloud security curve. (However, it is still important for organizations to understand how to fulfill their end of the Shared Responsibility Model to keep customer data safe.)
This focus on security and innovation is pushing the public sector space onto the cloud faster than ever as it becomes “the new norm.” We expect to see an influx of cloud management platform adoption by even more public sector cloud users, as this number grows.
See how CloudCheckr helps organizations manage and optimize cost, security, inventory, and utilization in their cloud as they grow. Learn more at our upcoming events and webinars.