AWS’ Teresa Carlson: Agencies Speed Up Move to Cloud During COVID-19 Pandemic

Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted government agencies to accelerate their migration to the cloud to meet telework requirements and increased mission demands, the Washington Business Journal reported Tuesday.

“The Covid-19 crisis showed just how fast organizations can move when missions need to drive decision-making,” Carlson said Tuesday at the virtual AWS Public Sector Summit.

She said AWS helped 14 state government agencies set up call centers to manage an increase in claims for unemployment insurance and provided support to nine federal agencies in their cloud adoption efforts in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’ve seen public sector organizations move so fast during this time,” Carlson said. “In fact, we’ve seen more innovation and movement in the past two to three months than we’ve seen in the past two years."