Fake and misleading material proliferates online, making it hard for voters to find trustworthy, reliable sources for election information. Combating this is the goal of the political institutions program at Argentinian non-profit think-tank the Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento, better known by its acronym CIPPEC.

As part of Argentina’s biennial election cycle, CIPPEC aims to provide citizens with information to promote evidence-based electoral decisions, improve the democratic process, and guarantee civil and political rights across the country.

“We have a commitment to informing voters and informing key actors on the election process,” said Carolina Tchintian (pictured, right), director of the Political Institutions Program at CIPPEC.

Tchintian and Leonardo Bracco (pictured, left), executive director of Latin America at CloudHesive, an Amazon Web Services Public Sector partner, spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. They discussed how AWS infrastructure helped secure CIPPEC’s website and safeguard Argentinian’s access to trustworthy election information. (* Disclosure below.)

The project’s impact was officially recognized by the Amazon Public Service Sector, which named it the Best Cybersecurity Solution during its 2020 Partner Awards.

Fast, secure, super-scalable user access through AWS

In 2017, the CIPPEC Political Institutions Program created a website to provide citizens with clear, concise and accessible information on political candidates, voting locations and polling analysis. They then created a link to that website via a Facebook button that showed in the feed of every eligible Argentinian voter.

Unfortunately, the campaign was too successful. “The landing page made our server collapse in the first hours of the election day,” Tchintian said. “The lesson there is, we cannot be limited by the infrastructure.”

With 72 hours before the 2019 election, the program had yet to ensure the same collapse didn’t happen. Knowing that its traditional hosting service couldn’t handle the job, they turned to CloudHesive for help.

“[CIPPEC] needed great reliability, performance, scalability of course, and the main thing security,” Bracco stated. In record time, his team analyzed the existing legacy infrastructure and developed a cloud-based solution that aligned with the program’s need for a very public yet very secure site.

Amazon Web Services Inc. held the key. “We did a strategy with [AWS] S3 [object storage], CloudFront, and at the same time monitored everything with CloudTrail and secured the public’s access to all of this information,” Bracco stated. “That gave us a perfect fit for the solution. A very easy solution and of course scalable, but more than anything, we improved the customer experience in a very small amount of time.”

Election day came and went without incident, and the numbers showed more than a 99.5 efficiency hit rate over CloudFront’s content delivery network. “And we kept server CPU below 10% all the time,” Bracco said. “So, this was a major success for us.”

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 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE