Today’s citizens live in a world of effortless digital experiences. They expect information to be easy to find, and for services to meet their specific needs. And when they do need help – they want it to be available instantly.
These expectations have been forged by interactions with banks, retailers, and other ecommerce providers, but they apply to all service providers – including public sector agencies.
Public sector leaders are no strangers to meeting citizen’s rising expectations for effective and innovative services, but traditional change methodologies that take years to deliver results no longer satisfy demands for rapid change.
At the AWS Public Sector Symposium in August, Simon Elisha, Chief Technologist for Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania at Amazon Web Services (AWS), shared that if public sectors leaders are to meet expectations of accelerated transformation they need to think big, but act small.
Elisha described how the applications and services offered in the AWS Cloud enable leaders to remain stubborn about their transformation vision, but be flexible in its delivery, and achieve remarkable results quickly and effectively.
Flexible and cost-effective
Thinking big but acting small starts with defining a significant goal, such as improving a government service. But rather than trying to deliver this improvement as a single multi-year project, acting small enables that goal to be broken down into achievable targets. This allows organisations to deliver benefits on an ongoing basis, without ever losing site of their larger vision, and the AWS Cloud makes this possible in several ways.
Firstly, the economics of cloud computing mean organisations can build immediately, without needing to make a significant upfront investment in infrastructure and software licences, and then increase or decrease their use of the cloud as needed.
In his keynote, Elisha shared that this has been beneficial for the Australian Taxation Office, which hosts numerous services in the AWS Cloud that could be easily scaled to demand during the busy tax reporting season. More than 2 million tax returns were processed via the AWS Cloud in the most recent tax year.
The cost-effective nature of the cloud is supported by Amazon’s commitment to cost reduction for customers, which had led to cost decreases across many services, including more than 100 reductions for its core Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service since it was launched in 2006.
Elisha said this commitment was demonstrated again recently with the release of the latest generation of AWS Graviton processors, which delivered a 40 per cent price performance improvement and enables customers to reduce spending simply by switching to the new processors.
AWS has also worked with customers to find efficiencies in their cloud usage through its Well-Architected Review process. This review process examines a client’s cloud environment, and makes recommendations on how to consume services in more cost-effective way, such as through using Savings Plans and Reserved Instances that can deliver savings of up to 75 per cent when compared to on-demand pricing.
These initiatives ensure customers have the flexibility to achieve their vision in the most economical way.
Low-risk experimentation
Elisha said another way the AWS Cloud enables organisations to stay flexible is through utilising the more than 200 applications and services that AWS offers, ranging from basic computing and storage, through to easy-to-adopt tools for harnessing artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI and machine learning (ML).
Because these services are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, this provides a low-risk way for agencies to experiment with different ways of building and delivering a long-term vision.
Elisha described how the cloud model ensures it is never too late to try a different way forward – a decision making process referred to at AWS as a ‘two-way door’ – creating a low-risk and cost-effective way for organisations to trial emerging capabilities such as AI.
One agency putting AWS’ AI services to the test is Transport for NSW. Elisha described how AWS’ ML capabilities give commuters real time journey information, while also helping operators plan for – and respond to – service disruptions, with Transport for NSW’s use of Amazon SageMaker’s ML training services having halved the time needed to train predictive models.
AWS also offers a range of tools to take advantage of breakthroughs in generative AI. Amazon Bedrock enables organisations to quickly and easily utilise foundation models from leading AI companies to deploy generative AI into applications, including using their own vast troves of data.
The flexible nature of the cloud is also helping deliver on some of the biggest visions imaginable, including at the Australian Government’s national science agency, CSIRO, where cloud had become a critical component of efforts to understand challenges such as climate change, and the next generation of super-bugs.
During the keynote presentation CSIRO’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr Angus Macoustra told the audience how CSIRO had been using the AWS Cloud since 2014.
“We are now seeing cloud used across many areas of our research, from using computer vision in analysing MRIs of the lungs, to development of a decision support system for minerals exploration and discovery, through to supporting management of our natural environment,” Dr Macoustra says.
Dr Macoustra said the agency was only at the beginning of its cloud journey, but its flexibility had become critical for helping CSIRO achieve its vision.
“The ability of science and innovation to solve our greatest challenges will be through bringing organisations together,” Dr Macoustra says. “For that to happen efficiently and securely, teams need secure platforms to share data and solutions, and that’s where cloud can be incredibly powerful.”
Safe, secure, sustainable
The flexibility of the cloud also ensures that even during time of rapid change, organisations can remain stubborn about the things that mattered most.
Elisha described how AWS’s commitment to delivering safe and secure computing services was ‘job number one’ for the company, with AWS now supporting 143 security standards and compliance certifications including PCI DSS, GPDR, ISO 20001, and HIPAA. Elisha said AWS is a Certified Strategic Provider under the Australian Government’s Hosting Certification Framework, and that AWS’s commitment to security was reflected in its latest IRAP certification process, which saw 145 services now assessed at the PROTECTED level.
He said AWS has already invested $9.2 billion in staff, facilities, and infrastructure in Australia since the launch of the AWS Sydney Region in 2012, and earlier this year announced it would spend more than $13 billion over the next five years on its Australian cloud infrastructure.
AWS is also working to ensure the cloud was the most sustainable computing platform, through initiatives including reducing the energy consumption of their Graviton processors and ensuring that its data centres were optimally powered and cooled. In fact, 451 Research found cloud computing in the Asia Pacific region was five times more energy efficient than on-premises data centres.
AWS has also committed to reaching net carbon zero by 2040, and has made numerous investments that would see all local operations powered from renewable energy by 2025, with the company committed to returning more water to community than it consumed from direct operations by 2030.
Conclusion
The ability for organisations to be stubborn about their vision, but flexible in their delivery was only made possible through the cloud, as only the cloud offered the range of services that organisations needed to find the best path forward in the most cost-effective way. These attributes made the cloud the ideal platform to support organisation transformation.
For further information on thinking big and acting small with the AWS Cloud, check out the Innovation for Life eBook here or have a chat with the AWS team.
