AWS’ Teresa Carlson on Federal Cloud Adoption During COVID-19 Pandemic

Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector business at Amazon Web Services and a 2020 Wash100 winner, said the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed government agency clients to adopt cloud platforms to address the increasing demands during the health crisis, the Washington Business Journal reported Friday.

“I think it was a real eye-opener for what they were able to do in the new digital world, and I don’t see us going back anytime soon from the progress that’s been made during Covid,” Carlson said Wednesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. “Nobody wants a crisis. But we also know history tells us that during crises, we usually get a great deal of innovation in solving, for whatever the reason.”

Carlson said federal agencies ramped up implementation of cloud capabilities to meet telework needs and AWS’ cloud certification programs also drew interest from agencies seeking to provide reskilling support to employees.

“We had a huge uptick in training courses,” Carlson noted. “Across our government customers, they started really absorbing the training courses for cloud curriculum. So that was exciting where, for us, at least you saw in their time where they couldn’t do what they needed to do that they were really trying to reskill and upskill themselves."