>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello and welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Summit online. Virtual. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm your host, John Furrier with the Cube with the quarantine crew. We got a great guest Cube alumni. Shannon Kellogg, vice president of Amazon Web Services AWS Public Policy Shannon, Great to see you. >>Hey, John, it's great to be back. I do feel like I'm a bona fide alumnus of the Cube, so thanks for having me. >>It's always great to have you on. You know, we've had many kind of conscious about policy and modernization of government. That's been the big trend kind of waves in your world. Now, with Cove in 19 you cannot ignore this. This was no longer an adjunct of physical spaces or physical realities. This reality is about virtualization, of of data, workloads, work, workforces, workplaces, workloads, work flows, you name it, it's impacted, and certainly this is a tough time for everyone to do work. More importantly, that it shows all the problems with modernization people aren't modern are really suffering. So I want to get your thoughts about as we go through this pandemic and look at stabilizing and coming out of it. A lot of reinvention and a lot of growth strategies that are changing in real time. So I want to get your thoughts on that real quick. >>Yeah, well, John, we've seen more innovation and migration to the cloud in the last few months than we have over the last few years. And, you know, things have been steady the last few years. You know, you've seen organizations continually migrate, Cloud and AWS, but organizations now accelerating, we're seeing at every level of government. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing, of course, in healthcare. And so organizations are trying to transform fast. One of the first problem sets that we were tackling in the early days of the code 19 response was to work with states here in the US as they were trying to set up their unemployment response efforts. And, ah, their you know, their unemployment insurance portals in places where citizens could go in and apply for those benefits. And you had a lot of states that were dealing with some very, um, old legacy systems that had to move quickly. And we, uh, you know, partnered with many of them and in several of our providers service providers to get them set up fast. And so that was one of the first, um, uh, things that we saw, you know, during the early stages of code 19 >>one of the big means going around the Internet, Obviously past couple months, as you know, the cliche of digital transformation or directional mission and then just being celebrated by covert, kind of like, ah, wrecking ball kind of hitting that digital transformation theme. Really kind of exposing people to the reality of it has to happen faster. I want to get your thoughts on this because you published an op ed piece today around the code 19 response on how the federal government should respond to this. And it's titled Rethinking Government Services in the wake of covert 19. You really make some strong points there, and I want to get your thoughts on that. Can you give a quick highlights of the key thoughts on that? Opted? What are you trying to say there? What's the positioning. What's the message? >>Yeah, well, as I mentioned, governments at every level have already started to accelerate their digital transformation effort. And one of the things that I was trying to really emphasize in the op ed today was that there is an opportunity to continue to do that certainly in the federal government, but also at state and local levels. And, um, you know, there have to be some investment in order to continue to enable that transformation, and there has to be continued leadership and focus on it. And, of course, it doesn't end just with government digital transformation. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing it in the health, their sector. And so, uh, what I am trying to emphasize now is that we've come a long way even in a few months, in helping organizations through this transformation provide better citizen services, provide emergency response efforts including, you know, as I mentioned at the state level, getting these unemployment insurance portals set up fast in the virtual call centers organized around those, uh, and certainly at the federal government. We've seen some large scale programmes rolled out without cloud computing. That would not have been successful in several cases. When you think about the billions of dollars and really trillions of dollars that's rolled out through these federal, uh, government relief efforts, uh, I t. Has been a very important part of that. And so now we need to continue to move forward and accelerate this digital transformation across the board. It we owe it, quite frankly, to citizens. And, um, you know, I think that there are a lot of lessons learned that we can draw from covered 19 responses. >>So are you making a case for Congress to allocate money for modernization of these services? >>Yeah, The good news is, John is that Congress for years in a bipartisan way, has been supporting federal I t. Modernization. And now they have an opportunity, especially as you look at what's happening out of the states and again thinking about how some of these old legacy systems really delayed or hurt some of the covered 19 response efforts. The states need funding in order to modernize some of these systems, or it's not every federal agency as the funding that they need either. And there's an opportunity for Congress also to provide some of that funding. I saw that you spoke with my colleague Matt Cornelius over at the Alliance for additional Innovation and talked a lot about the modernizing technologies on it, some of those efforts and how important it is for Congress in a bipartisan way to make sure that the mighty modernization in federal agencies fully funded. And I support that. And I know that many other not only companies but trade associations like the Alliance for Additional Innovation do as well. >>And tomorrow >>I'm and I'm talking about up Skilling, of course, which is an important part. >>Well, I mean, you look at that. Look at the attic being the systems. They're antiquated, their old, you've got unemployment. That's just new jobs need to be filled re Skilling of existing jobs because the cloud is part of it. And then just the local economy is going to be impacted. Just online education, new roles and new responsibilities. So I got to ask you with with what you're seeing, what are the lessons? Have you learned that can keep up the momentum in the government? Because I see this is an accelerant. This pandemic. What lessons? >>In addition to what I was saying earlier on the funding side, having a focus on training and upscaling and re Skilling is really critical. Um, we have a lot of work worse development programmes here at Amazon and AWS that we're rolling out and providing a service or or our public sector customers and colleagues. We're also doing a lot in terms of helping, um, various parts of the population retrain and get involved in the digital economy. One of the I think really great examples of how we've been doing that for several years are the military assistance programs that we have been involved in where we're working with partners, community college level four year education institutions, Teoh provide training and certification for workers that are coming out of the military and or their spouses. That's something that we leave were both again the community college level, but even have partnered with the federal government, the Department of Labor in some of those programs. And we have to continue to do that we and others to accelerate what we're doing in terms of the workforce development effort. Um, you know, across every level of government, right? Frankly, >>you know, I've been doing a lot of virtual cube virtual events covering them, building software for them. Um, and then this is big focus on the remote workers work from home. I get that. That's an I T kind of paradigm. Companies have a focus of their workers, but also there's a remote customer, remote prospect or remote user. So the stakeholders of all these systems now are exposed in the It's pretty obvious who's winning and who's got a good solution. So I got to ask you, What's the learnings? Are you you're seeing over the past few months around this remote worker or remote consumer, because people have to do their jobs. But they also have suppliers in respect to how the Internet has evolved the ecosystem of partners and companies and and stakeholders. There's a lot of learnings here. What would you share the past couple months? >>So John is probably obvious to you that Kobe, 19 has transformed how people are working, obviously, and that's no different here at Amazon. Many of us are working remotely and have been for several months. Certainly, we're seeing, um, a huge transformation in the public sector around remote work. The federal government is you know, for years has had initiatives around Tele work. Uh, champions, like Gerry Connolly, a U S representative from Virginia, have been very focused on trying to move the federal government in that direction. And thank goodness, because I think if if those efforts weren't already in place, you would not have seen a So many people will be able to work from home as fast as they did during covered 19. But still, there's a lot more work to do in our federal agencies to adopt. Hello, work and, um, remote working. Uh, we're seeing that at the state level. We're seeing that in educational institutions, there's a ton more work there to do. And, you know, I think there's an opportunity. Teoh continue through these digital transformation efforts, enabling remote work and tele work. But we also have to have bipartisan collaboration to continue to push forward those efforts at the federal level. >>You know, it's interesting and I want to get your reaction is you're a veteran not only of technology, but also policy. And as I was saying earlier in an interview I was doing this morning around your event, is that on the commercial side. We saw Amazon. I mean, I was a history of Amazon developers. I t enterprise, commercial and now public sector. It's the same movie. Inadequate old systems need to be modernized cloud, certainly helping there. But you look at that. Look at the flywheel of Amazon, infrastructures of service, platforms of service and sass. A lot of people in the public sector are laying down the foundational things around infrastructure, getting on auditing, compliance system that's agile and then building a platform on top for a new workload. So I got to get your reaction to the three things that we're seeing. Changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are happening right now at an accelerated level. All three of those theaters are exploding and change. What's your thoughts and reaction? >>Well, one of the things that I've seen over the years, as you know, you saw first movers in the cloud and you saw organizations adopt these technologies is that sometimes you know when you look at federal workers, for example, or you even look across the public sector. People were a little apprehensive sometimes adopting these new technologies and practices, because they, um you know were adverse the risk or felt that if they did, you know, service a first mover, do something bold that it might come back to potentially, um, you know, hurt them in some way in terms of the risks that they took if something went wrong. And so now, over the last several months, I've seen that apprehension in every organization that we're working with basically not be there, because people recognize that they have to move now, move quickly and adopt these new technologies. Adopt these new practices in order to do their jobs to provide. If you're in government, the right services do your citizens into the people who need those services. If you're in the private sector to move faster, to be able to provide more services more quickly to your customers, I mean, think about a company like ours where we had to scale up very, very fast. We were already scaling rapidly, but we had to scale even more wrap and and so it's really, really important. I think that, you know, we draw on these lessons over the last few months, especially in relation to the public sector, where it's okay to take a risk. It's okay to adopt new technologies and practices. And it's okay to move fast, because you know what? In a situation like over 19 sometimes you're gonna have to move very, very quickly to that remote working environment, or you're gonna have to move very quickly to set up a you know, a digital or virtual call center in order to provide basic services that people need to survive. So it's just a really interesting transformation that I'm seeing out there. >>Yeah, it was interesting out to share some commentary from myself and I want to get your reaction to that is that in the hundreds of people that I've talked to in the DC area, covering public sector of the past many years is has been this younger audience and this younger workforce. And then now look at the pandemic. You look at the impact on education, unemployment in the citizenship of in the communities, not just state, but local. You're seeing an uprising. You're seeing a silent revolution from the younger constituents was saying, you know Hey, I don't care what it takes. Just go faster. Support me. Deliver the kind of serve, Be agile I mean, they're kind of speaking Dev ops in their own way. So a silent revolution is happening and I want to get your thoughts. But I know you and I have talked about this briefly and I use the word summit revolution. But people were younger generation like What are you talking about? Manuals like shipping old procurement methods. What's the problem? What's the blocker? Why is that? There is really no answer to that. So I want to get your thoughts to that cause that's something that we're seeing in this silent revolution is emerging in this I t modernization the government because people will expect faster services. They're >>unemployed. I wanted to be a lot more of the startup mentality. And, you know, I don't think it's, ah, even age restrictive. You know, every organization that we're working with, we have workers at every in every age group, and, you know, we're seeing people just shift to this mentality of okay, I need this service now. I need to move faster, and you know, we have to get access to this remotely in order to do this or to do that. And so to me, it's not you know, necessarily, just in a certain part of our population and everybody is starting. I think that way in every organization that we're working with and they're throwing out some of the, you know, some of the, um uh, old practices or old way of thinking. I mean, I can't tell you how many state officials I've had Call me during this covered 19 response who were asking for help. Like, we've got to do this now. How can we get your help to do this now And and to me, that's just, you know, that start up mentality like we've got to figure this out. No matter if our procurement practices aren't where they should be or our systems aren't where they should be. We have to figure this out. And to me, that's sort of a startup mentality. A you know, a transformational approach that we're seeing across the board. >>I would I would agree with that. Also add that a lot of people want to have a mission and they want to get involved in public service and see a way to contribute. So I see an inward my inbound migration for people getting involved, assault on these public sector problems cause it's a societal impact, and I think you're going to start to see people realizing that they can just taken protest. They can vote, but they also get involved. And I think you're going to see developers. I think it will be a tsunami of of new creative work loads or applications coming quickly. I think that's gonna be very >>interested. John. I I couldn't agree more. I think I think, you know, we're seeing transformation not just in the public sector and how services are providing are provided, but also in our economy and how we interact with people and how we socialize. And, you know, it's just a complete transformation in different way of thinking. And organizations and individuals are out there creating right now, much of it in the cloud, trying to figure out how to innovate, trying to figure out how you know, to come up with new business models and approaches. And so it's It's very exciting, you know, to see some of that also the top there in to talk to people as they're thinking about new ways to do things, you know, it's it's unfortunately very tragic given, You know, the circumstances around Kobe 19. But when things get difficult like this and people, you know, base, uh, challenges like this, you know, they tend to and we all tend to figure out how we can help, how we can maybe think differently, how we can help with the transformation. And we're certainly seeing that in the public sector and through some of these digital transformation efforts. But to your point, we're also seeing it in the private sector. >>What's great about the economy. People solve problems together. And that's one of the best things about America and Free States nations out there. So I want to shift a little bit. As I know this is something that's close to you, your heart as well as mine. You wrote a block post this past year earlier in the year, so we're supporting veterans to get into stem programs. How are you thinking about that and getting them back into the workforce? Certainly for and after the pandemic? >>Yeah, we're really passionate about this area, John. I'm glad you asked. I mentioned a little bit before some of the training that we're doing with colleges and universities and even directly with the government for, um uh, you know, military members that are transferring out. Our folks are already veterans or their spouses. You know. It's also important to remember the families who have been there right at the side of our veterans and those that air service a providing service in the military for the country. And so we're super passionate about that at every level of Amazon and every level, certainly of AWS. We have a lot of programs across Amazon to hire veterans to train veterans, including in above basic skills as well as advanced cloud skills. And we're super excited about all of those programs. I mentioned many of those in the block bus that you're referring to, and I would encourage folks toe look on our AWS public sector blawg for more information on those efforts, we're constantly updating and providing more insight and how those programs are being conduct >>well, Shannon, one of the things that's interesting and just to kind of close out our chat here is sustainability because you look at the carbon footprint, a lot of cars on the road, you see and seeing people being happy about that. But this points to what technology can do to help. Sustainability has had some announcements here at the summit. Can you share highlights on that? >>Yeah. So we have lots going on in sustainability across Amazon. Amazon Web services, or AWS, has been a big part of that. We have, ah, long term goal of being 100% renewable and eventually carbon carbon neutral. Our initial renewable energy goal is in 2025 s. So we've been, um, you know, enabling the availability of a lot more utility scale. Renewable energy is part of that effort just across the river in Virginia. We have multiple solar projects that we've been putting in place and backing financially now for several years as part of that effort. And we're doing that across the country as well as across the world. And that's something that we believe very strongly in. And, you know, the company Amazon just announced a $2 billion climate fund last week that focuses on startups and technology, a new technologies and new companies in this space. And that is also something that we're very proud. So we believe very strongly about this area. I you have been involved for a number of years in sustainability efforts in the in the company and in particular in AWS. Tonight I have the pleasure of also serving on the American Council for Renewable Energy, which does one of the leading non profits and organizations in this space. And there's, you know, there's a lot of momentum for, you know, renewable energy. And even with some of the challenges around code 19 and the economic challenges that industry is is moving forward. And, you know, we as a company are very, very committed to enabling more renewable energy to be available, including right across the river in Virginia. >>Well, Shannon, you got your hands full as the vice president of AWS public policy in d. C. Not only do we have the pandemic, we just got them sea change of massive innovation coming a digital. I know you've got the world down. They're evolving really quickly. Congratulations. And, you know, stay with it and keep keep plugging away for that innovation strategy. Appreciate it, >>John. We appreciate it. Thanks so much for including me and AWS on the queue began during the public sector summit. >>Michael, >>always good to see >>my pleasure. Always. Great societal changes coming. Real impact. This is the focus. Digital technology's going to make a difference. Change the economics. Changing experiences and outcomes for public services. Public in societal change. Kellog Shannon Kellogg, vice President of public Policy here in the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.