How Irish government bodies can protect their critical services with AWS

Citizens justifiably expect their governments to show resilience in response to serious challenges, whether it is a natural disaster, cyberattack, or geopolitical event, writes Mark Finlay, Head of Public Sector, Ireland, Amazon Web Services.

As part of this, governments must be able to protect and maintain core digital assets and records such as population and property registers, education records, revenue and tax data, benefits systems, and more. To better prepare governments for what might arise, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has created Continuity of Government IT on AWS (CGIT), a comprehensive cloud-based solution that enables governments to protect their digital assets and services during disruptions of any kind.

“CGIT gives public sector bodies the ability to leverage globally distributed IT infrastructure to underpin their continuity plans. They are no longer constrained by localised backup solutions or expensive and vulnerable third-party on-premises facilities,” says Liam Maxwell, Director of Government Transformation for AWS. “This means they can focus on the operational aspects of maintaining key government services using the range of continuity options AWS provides. By leveraging these best practices, governments can be more prepared now than before.”

Real-life use cases

CGIT is being used to support Ukraine during the war with Russia. To date, AWS has safely migrated over 10 petabytes of essential data from 42 Ukrainian ministries, 24 universities, a remote learning K-12 school serving thousands of displaced children and dozens of private sector companies. In addition, AWS created a centralised tool to help officials from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and other public health agencies request and track incoming supplies and monitor the capacity of nearby hospitals to better treat the wounded.

“CGIT gives public sector bodies the ability to leverage globally distributed IT infrastructure to underpin their continuity plans.”

Within Ireland, an example of CGIT in practice is the Department of Health’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as it unfolded. In three short weeks, the Department built a multi-channel digital Covid-19 call centre service in the AWS Cloud to deal with citizen queries. Designed for flexibility and scalability, the call centre seamlessly handled 400,000 calls versus the 60,000 expected in its first week of operation.

Regardless of how it is used, CGIT provides flexible, resilient, and secure infrastructure that can withstand challenging events. That is because the AWS Cloud has been designed to meet the needs of militaries, global banks, and other highly sensitive organisations.

A closer look at the CGIT process

The CGIT journey begins with situational awareness. AWS Professional Services or an AWS partner works with government IT leaders to assess their current continuity and reliability posture and map potential challenges and opportunities that can be addressed using the AWS Cloud.

Because continuity can have a different meaning for services with different criticality, complexity, or context, CGIT classifies the approach for continuity into three levels:

• Level 1: Cloud backup. At this level, the AWS Cloud is used to securely store critical datasets in the Ireland AWS Region, within which there are three availability zones. Level 1 CGIT engagements help determine the best strategy for building a secure landing zone, implementing control and governance mechanisms to secure data, and establishing an architecture for continuous backup and uncomplicated restore.
• Level 2: Pre-planned migration. CGIT prepares government services to be migrated to or recovered in the cloud at a moment’s notice. As resources are often limited in a crisis, CGIT activities focus on preparing plans and procedures for service migration and recovery, with a preference for fully automated and frequently verified actions.
• Level 3: Active cloud standby. Essential services for emergency response, public safety or national security can be designed to allow the smooth shift of operations between on-premises and the cloud.

Learn more or get started with CGIT

Continuity of Government IT on AWS is available to both local and central government in Ireland. The CGIT team will work with you and AWS Partner Network members of your choice to establish the best path towards your continuity goals. To learn more or obtain the Continuity of Government IT on AWS solution guide, email us.

E: aws-publicsector-ireland@amazon.com
W: www.aws.amazon.com