1. Rely on a Strong Compliance Record
Government agencies can’t choose cloud service providers without proper vetting. State and local governments abide by stringent operational guidelines, which assess a platform’s viability based on security and compliance.
AWS GovCloud and AWS US East/West are certified by FedRAMP — the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program — to handle sensitive data and accounts. More than 6,500 government agencies rely on them. Additionally, Amazon’s Authority to Operate on AWS Program drives three times more authorizations than Azure or Google Cloud. IT teams have the greenlight with AWS.
LEARN ABOUT: How private sectors can meet federal software security compliance standards.
2. Accurately Measure Your Budget for Cloud Services
AWS resources operate continuously. It’s necessary to assess pricing for solutions like the company’s GovCloud, Elastic Compute Cloud and others before committing. AWS provides cost tables, which are tabulated per second, per minute or per month.
Storage, compute and database resources can be expensive. However, governments can sidestep heavy input costs with AWS. Teams can calculate their running costs with the AWS Pricing Calculator. They also may tailor service plans to meet agency spending goals. AWS offers pay-as-you-go options, reserved capacities and volume discounts.
Monitoring is key to decoding fluid expenditures. Continual analysis via spending reports and forecasts is crucial for budget optimization. How are services utilized? Are savings possible?
3. Ensure Robust Cloud Monitoring and Security
Visibility into one’s AWS infrastructure is essential. Amazon and partners offer tools that compile real-time analytics, such as Amazon CloudWatch and CDW Amplified™ services. Governments oversee highly sensitive data from numerous sources. AWS realizes this, and it provides GovCloud deployments for all security classification levels.
AWS solutions are scalable without compromising security. After establishing monitoring based on determined goals, teams may see how active government services are. Is uptime universally steady? Is activity normal, or does it indicate something nefarious, like a distributed denial of service attack or a hack?
It’s also important to monitor active ports, root access and password integrity and to establish role-based access control to bolster AWS security.
EXPLORE: Zero trust and modernization efforts within the GSA.
4. Establish Thresholds for Alerts on Cloud Services
AWS performance will fluctuate as services operate. CPU percentages, memory consumption and utilization can change in minutes. Consider how the original version of healthcare.gov faltered under the demand; covidtests.gov took those lessons into account and ran smoothly. It’s crucial to know public systems can effectively pass similar stress tests.
All IT teams should establish threshold-based alerting. When instances and resources become taxed, rapid reallocation may be necessary. Governments can’t allow crashes or poor performance to impact users. AWS allows teams to extinguish fires.
