Deploying applications to the cloud in the public sector would have been practically unheard of not much more than a decade ago. Fast forward, and now Washington, D.C. is the host city for a major summit from cloud services provider Amazon Web Services Inc.

Health tech, aerospace and public cloud security considerations were top of the agenda during the recent AWS Summit Washington, DC event. If you missed it, here’s a look at five key revelations from the event. (* Disclosure below.)

1. Space is heading to public cloud

The aerospace industry is taking to the cloud. It’s happening in part because of a new entrepreneurial spirit within the sector eager to leverage the speed and agility cloud promises. With security offerings having matured for cloud platforms, the public sector is better able to make use of cloud solutions,  according to Clint Crosier, director of aerospace and satellite solutions at AWS and retired Maj. Gen. of the Space Force and Air Force.

“The more space data we can make more accessible to more people around the world, we’re seeing that we can unlock things that we could never do before,” Crosier said in an interview with theCUBE.

Tracking endangered whales, measuring global warming greenhouse gasses and a satellite-based augmented reality system for first responders to visualize disaster zones are three examples of data-intensive space applications well suited to cloud.

“None of those workloads were possible five years ago. Cloud-based technologies are really what opens those kinds of workloads up. Government classified customers tell us the reason they came to AWS is our security,” Crosier stated.

2. Compliance is becoming more critical

AWS’ emphasis on compliance is reinforcing a commitment to the public sector as AWS GovCloud reaches its 10^th birthday. With a swath of compliance mechanisms in place, GovCloud is able to serve several departments within the government, according to Keith Brooks, director of business development and GTM at Amazon Web Services, during an interview with theCUBE.

For one, AWS is enabling defense contractors to create compliant environments to meet the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification in order to process, maintain and store data on behalf of the DoD. That’s required as the agency shifts from contractor self-compliance to assessment. CMMC is a federal program geared toward the DoD, having been designed for cybersecurity management and certification. The FBI introduced a government-wide, multi-departmental cybersecurity strategy in 2020.

Such specialized frameworks give customers “a turnkey capability in tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet CMMC controls and DoD Security Requirements Guide controls,” Brooks detailed.

Ten years on and the AWS GovCloud ecosystem has presented otherwise impossible opportunities for cloud native startups to serve the public sector. For instance, Smartronix LLC works to automate the more tedious tasks for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.

“We want customers to focus on their mission, national security, healthcare outcomes,” John Sankovich, president of cloud at Smartronix, told theCUBE during the Summit.

3. AWS programs empower partners to accelerate growth during pandemic

The COVID crisis highlighted the need for government to rapidly transform to digital.

“During the pandemic everybody was moving to the cloud,” said Sandy Carter, vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs at AWS, who spoke to theCUBE during the event.

Carter highlighted the AWS Competency Program, built for aiding the public sector in its digital transformation. The idea is, in part, to discover partners.

AWS helps guide companies looking at obtaining the required certifications to work with government through its Authority to Operate on AWS program. The ATO program includes overseas compliance help, too, including with the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Information Security Registered Assessors Program in Australia.

4. How public sector will mimic enterprise

As the enterprise sector realizes the value of data capture and analytics, particularly in support of artificial intelligence and other machine learning initiatives, so too will public organizations, such as federal health departments.

Startup Electronic Caregiver is an example of innovation in health tech, using data analytics and machine learning in a serverless environment atop AWS for a hybrid telecare solution.

“What it enables us to do is we have a whole bunch of different patient-facing devices, which we now integrate all into one backend, through which we can run our data analytics, our machine learning, and then present curated, actual data to the [health] providers,” said Mark Francis, chief digital health integration officer at the company, in an interview with theCUBE.

Francis emphasized that cloud underpinnings mitigate some of the health industry’s current logistical bottlenecks.

5. How Virginia became the cloud capital of the world

Trickle-down cloud is behind AWS’ claim that cloud investment in a state (or in Virginia’s case, semantically, a commonwealth) ups the Gross Domestic Product significantly.

“Virginia, over the last 15 years, has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world,” said Shannon Kellogg, VP of Americas public policy at AWS, during an interview with theCUBE.

An AWS-backed study claims it had contributed $4.3 billion to the state’s gross domestic product by investing in the building and maintaining of data centers, notably geographically adjacent to the district.

Vacant land, easy-to-tap power, and AOL Inc.’s then-redundant and available fiber cables contributed to the choice for AWS’ first big data center located in Loudoun County, Virginia. Seventy percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through the county’s data centers, according to John Wood, chief executive officer of Telos Corp., during an interview with theCUBE.

Be sure to watch SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s full 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.)

Image: Vit-Mar