As with businesses, the public sector was also tremendously shaken by the need to quickly modernize its IT infrastructure to meet new demands during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving to the cloud, for example, is no longer a question of “if” but “when” and “how.”

Technology vendors working with governments are trying to make this modernization journey easier. VMware Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. announced that VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (U.S.) has reached FedRAMP Authority to Operate at the High Impact Level, which means that it can run highly sensitive government workloads with the hardened security and production-grade capabilities that government agencies require.

“Today the government operates on VMware across all of the government, state, local and federal; some workloads are still on-prem,” said Lynn Martin (pictured, right), vice president of government, education and healthcare at VMware. “This will really accelerate that transformation journey to the cloud and be able to move workloads quicker onto the VMC on AWS platform without rearchitecting your applications.”

Martin and Sandy Carter (pictured, left), VP of worldwide public sector partners and programs at AWS, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. They discussed the details of VMware and AWS’ announcement to the public sector, the biggest challenges to accelerating innovation for government agencies, and how public sector customers are using VMware Cloud on AWS to break down the barriers to innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Fast migration and cost savings are benefits

Migration speed is often a very important consideration for any agent moving critical workloads to the cloud. A great value proposition of the VMware and AWS partnership for the public sector is providing a very fast migration process, according to Carter.

“We have workloads that we’ve migrated that have taken weeks, months, as opposed to years as they go over, which is really powerful,” she said.

VMware Cloud on AWS also promises to enable fast and efficient migration of key databases, such as SQL Server and Oracle, so government officials can leverage that data in the cloud to make better, real-time decisions,. Another promised benefit is cost savings.

“The cost, in general, to operate in the cloud versus on-prem are significant savings. We’ve seen savings over 300% on some customers,” Martin stated.

As the areas most disrupted by the pandemic are in the public sector — health, education and government — the demand for tech modernization around these activities has grown sharply. And that created a lot of opportunities for technology providers to act.

“That’s what we’re all about: customer obsession, working backwards with the customer and making sure that our partnership continues to add value to those customers,” Carter concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit Washington, DC. 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