Some ginormous names in the public sector — such as the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency — have made their preference for cloud computing known. The broader reality in government, though, is that most agencies could be doing a great deal more in terms of modernizing and digitizing their computing architectures and operations.

“Technology is far outpacing what our federal government can do,” according to Dave Levy (pictured), vice president of federal government at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Levy spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed how cloud and new data technologies could transform government agencies (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Gov sits on data goldmine

The roadblocks to progress exist all the way down to the policies around procurement reform. AWS and many in government firmly believe that procurement reform is needed so that agencies can adopt public cloud and modernize faster, according to Levy. The key benefit of cloud for these agencies is the way it allows them to use their data in brand new ways. This can enable them to significantly change they way they interact with the public through services.

But many agencies do not have a clue as to all the data they possess and what they might do with it, Levy pointed out. It is often cooped up in siloes that make advanced analytics impossible.

“The data in a lot of our customers’ [environments] has been spread out. It’s been in different data centers; it’s been in different environments; sometimes it’s under somebody’s desk. So this idea of data and data management is really exciting to a lot of our customers,” Levy stated.

Once these organizations have all of this data in cloud, they’re often surprised at what tumbles out. There are likely many untapped possibilities across government agencies, according to Levy. For example, “We’ve got millions of visitors to our national parks every day, and we don’t know what’s possible with a lot of those data sets,” he said.

Beyond procurement reform, training programs are crucial to speed up cloud adoption and DX in government, Levy added. “It’s incumbent upon us, and it’s incumbent upon the agencies to really deliver it,” he concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE