It’s widely known that the public sector lags behind the commercial business world in terms of digital readiness. If COVID-19 highlighted companies that weren’t digitally ready, the pandemic beamed a spotlight on the inadequacies of government to adapt to an online world. 

“We worked with one state agency that experienced a 400% spike in demand for applications for unemployment benefits. … They just couldn’t respond to that kind of surging demand,” said Casey Coleman (pictured), senior vice president of global government solutions at Salesforce.com Inc. 

Coleman spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit event. They discussed Salesforce’s announcement that Government Cloud Plus is FedRAMP approved at high security level and generally available to the public sector. (* Disclosure below.)

GovCloud Plus is FedRAMP ‘high approved’ and ready to go

When it came to the aforementioned agency, Salesforce and Amazon Web Services Inc. took less than a week to solve the problem. A virtual contact center staffed by chatbots met the demand, allowing people to sign up and receive the benefits for which they were entitled.

The initiative underlying this came from a partnership between Salesforce and AWS that combines AWS’ GovCloud with Salesforce’s customer relationship management acumen to create a series of cloud services known as Government Cloud Plus. 

GovCloud Plus is “Salesforce’s Customer 360 CRM platform that runs on Amazon Web Services in their GovCloud environment,” Coleman stated. With provisional authority to operate from the FedRAMP program office at the highest security level, it is “ready to go, generally available, and ready for customers,” she added.

Salesforce doesn’t seem a likely platform on which to offer public sector services. But while “governments don’t think of themselves as selling,” public agency operations fall under the same functions as any business, according to Coleman. What GovCloud Plus does is translate those functions into terms that apply to the public sector.

Rebuilt architecture from the ground up

But Salesforce has done more than re-platform its cloud solutions on AWS. “We really are organically taking advantage of infrastructure services that AWS provides,” Coleman said. “AWS has already deployed the FedRAMP high version of their infrastructures and services. By riding on top of that, we inherit all of those existing controls; add our own FedRAMP controls. And our customers benefit from the best-in-class security from two of the most trusted names in public cloud.”

This means that government agencies can safely step onto the superhighway of digital transformation and provide the same instant, personalized mobile services that people expect from private sector apps.

“It’s really going to make a fundamental shift in how we reimagine government in the future,” Coleman 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 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit Online event. 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