After government and educational institutions made heroic leaps to move virtual this year, how can you modernize, manage, and scale up and down these services cost-effectively?
On behalf of AWS and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around the new normal, delivering applications to students and staff on their own devices. Where Andrew DeFoe, business development manager for end-user computing at AWS, will discuss how you can modernize, manage, and scale up and down these services cost effectively.
Andrew DeFoe: Good morning, and thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. My name is Andrew DeFoe. I'm a business development manager with AWS and our worldwide public sector team, focusing on end-user computing. Today, we're going to talk about remote work and learning solutions for remote employees, students and contact center agents. We'll focus a lot on desktop and app-streaming solutions from AWS, ask some customer success that we've seen recently and been able to support actively around remote work and business continuity. And we'll talk about some of the solutions and we'll talk about why AW. So the agenda for today really is to talk about how all of us are observing work is changing, the way that AWS can provide solutions for remote employees, students and contact center agents, why AWS for these solutions, and then how you can get started and take next steps.
So we talked about the way work is changing. Before COVID-19, as of 2019, in state and local government, about 54% of agencies had blended-workforce policies emphasizing contractor hiring, improved management, flexibility, worker productivity. This is really about cost reduction and being able to offset the attrition employee turnover that was taking place in local government. And this is before COVID and, of course, since COVID, most agencies right now are facing challenges around budget shortfalls and a lot of uncertainty about the future. In addition to that, of course, we have the challenges around needing to be able to work from home, work anywhere, with anyone, at any time. That's put an enormous amount of pressure on IT organizations. Most organizations had capabilities to provide some business continuity around remote work for certain types of employees. Highly unlikely that agencies had a plan to address that for 100% of the workforce. So this is a real challenge for IT.
And we see the same trends in education as well, with the need to be able to provide continuity of learning for students both in K-12 and in higher education. And customers tell us really it's about these changes. It's about the changing workforce, of course, the changing data center and the general migration to software as a service in the cloud, but also the increasing security challenges, as well. Security, as all these challenges are taking place, is still job zero. Our customers are trying to manage a user base. It's constantly changing desktops, applications, files, content. Each user has to be able to access that and do that remotely now. Contractors obviously continue to pose a security risk at the state and even the federal level. As you probably know, as in the US since 2014, there have been approximately 443 data government, military breaches involving hundreds of millions of records. And, generally, the leading causes of these breaches are stolen devices, contractors with insufficient security background checks and ineffective data access policies.
And so AWS solutions can address a lot of these security concerns and help our customers in government and education move confidently into the cloud to be able to support and provide continuity of work and continuity of learning. And so that was before COVID. Now, with COVID, of course, the challenges is that for employees and students to be able to continue working and communicating and collaborating, the business need to maintain continuity, the sudden unforeseen surge of remote work is obviously placing a huge amount of pressure on IT. As I mentioned before, it's more than likely that you had IT continuity plans, you've got laptop devices that are now in short supply, VPN connectivity that may be under licensed or over-provisioned in terms of the capacity to support 100% of the workforce. IT is under a tremendous amount of pressure. And really what is needed is agility in the solutions and the technology capabilities that you have to be able to address the uncertainty moving forward.
And so these challenges really are about how end users can communicate, how they can collaborate with each other, how students can attend class virtually, how, you know, workers like contact center agents can continue to interact with the public and support those use cases and those processes for the public remotely. And so organizations today are asking questions like, "How do I enable my end users to remotely access the apps that they need? How do my end users engage each other using audio and video conferencing at scale? How do your contact center employees and processes remain operational even when they're working from home? And then how do you extend your security and your on premises network environment into the cloud securely to make all that happen?" So AWS is actively supporting agencies and institutions scale technology and infrastructure to be able to address these kinds of scenarios. And, for AWS, it is not about a one-size-fits-all strategy to address these use cases, AWS solutions inter-operate with existing technologies that you have.
And there's always going to be multiple options and solutions to address requirements. And I think the customers that have been able to respond most effectively to the challenges that we're all now facing are flexible in terms of how they think about the solutions that are required for specific use cases across the organization. And they have the ability to call on the services, like AWS, to be able to address those specific use cases. And so today we'll talk about some of these different solutions that AWS provides around remote work and learning. We'll focus a lot on the desktop and app-streaming capabilities of WorkSpaces and AppStream today. But I do want to take an opportunity to provide more information about all of the services that AWS provides to, again, meet specific use cases that you may have. And, again, we don't consider it to be a one size fits all, but a combination of approaches and technologies to address specific use cases based on your needs.
So first, Amazon WorkSpaces is the managed secure desktop as a service solution, that AWS provides mobile and remote employees access to apps they need. We deliver a cloud desktop accessible anywhere with an internet connection. Using pretty much any supported device with an internet connection, with WorkSpaces your employees and your students get fast, responsive desktops that are sized for their specific role and tasks in the organization. Amazon AppStream 2.0 is our fully managed application streaming service. And so instead of full desktops, you have the ability to deliver specific Windows-based applications. And so remote workers and especially students can access the desktop applications they need from anywhere on almost every device, including a browser. So AppStream will stream applications to Chromebooks, Macs, PCs, tablet devices. The benefit really of AppStream is that you're only having to pay for the time that your users are logged in streaming an application, in addition to a small user fee to cover the client-access costs into Windows.
What this really means is you can scale specific business processes, whether that's going to be a line of business application that's needed for a particular government agency or organization or department. It could be, in academia, the ability to support continuity of learning around specific applications for STEM learning, or within computer labs that are no longer assessable. And so this is a technology that you can utilize for a number of different use cases to remote and extend business processes that you already have established and to be able to support those and have continuity from any location. WorkDocs is our file share and collaboration service that, essentially, lets you think about use cases to retire a legacy file share infrastructure, and move those shares into the cloud. It allows you to integrate with existing systems and allows you to create, in addition, rich APIs, so you can front end business processes that require, let's say, the public to be able to upload and move data to be able to allow remote workers to interact.
And so as an example of a process today required a user or a person in the public to walk in and provide documentation, WorkDocs is a solution that can facilitate digital transfer of that data and allow your employees to access that data on behalf of the public. So it's a very flexible tool, a rich set of APIs, but really is designed to help extend and replace cloud-share services. Amazon Chime is our chat and meeting, as well as the ability to create and place phone calls in a secure application from any location. And so you have a single tool that allows you to collaborate and instantly go from chat to a call, screen sharing, and to be able to invite individuals to join your meetings. The benefits of Chime are, of course, the flexibility to be able to pay just for what you need and to be able to scale to support any number of users. Amazon Connect is our solution for virtual contact center. It allows organizations to have a fully operational contact center that can be operated from virtually anywhere.
So we've seen a number of scenarios where just dealing with the added call volume for benefits and services, whether it's employment or other benefits, health care place a tremendous strain. And features like integrated voice response and automation. Connect has really been utilized to help organizations manage that additional flow of inbound conversations and be able to support additional agents, and support those interactions with the public. The Connect is definitely a solution that can help you scale and modernize your contact center, especially in scenarios where you have agents that are interacting from a distance and possibly from home. And then, lastly, our AWS client VPN is a fully managed, pay-as-you-go VPN service. This is a service that does elastically scale to support thousands of remote users. We've heard from many customers right now that the traditional VPN solutions that were utilized on premises cannot scale cost effectively to be able to support 100% of users that need to be able to access data and applications remotely.
Client VPN from AWS can be a tool that can be utilized to address some of those challenges. With client VPN, you, essentially, create endpoints inside of AWS, you associate those with a virtual private cloud. And you can extend that virtual private cloud into your on-premises network. So it's essentially a way for you to leverage and scale VPN services, utilizing the backbone of AWS. And so whether you have users with laptops or mobile devices, client VPN is a service that can address those remote work scenarios. And so why AWS for remote work and learning? Really for us and for our customers, it's about helping them control and have confidence that you have a platform to address uncertainty and changes in demand for remote work and remote-learning scenarios. Number one, security, for us, of course, is job zero. It starts with our core infrastructure. Our services are custom built for the cloud. They're designed to meet the most stringent security frameworks and requirements in the world.
Our infrastructure is monitored 24/7. It helps our customers ensure confidence, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and your services. You can rely on the scale and the global infrastructure of AWS, knowing that you always have full control of your data, where that data is stored, the ability to encrypt it, manage it, move it and, essentially, have complete control over retention of that data at any time. And that's going to be true regardless of where your infrastructure and where your users are located within AWS. We've seen how that agility and how that control can manifest itself right now, since February, March, we've seen organizations onboard 10s of thousands of employees into remote work scenarios in response to the work-from-home and stay-at-home orders. But, generally, this is a solution that you should be thinking about for even additional business continuity or unplanned events. It's really when you need that kind of agility and the flexibility of the cloud, that you really are able to realize the control and the competence that our platform can provide.
The ability to adapt to changing business needs is really important. When you think about additional services or capabilities, most of those services require licenses, they require commitment, they require contracts. Our services allow you to adopt, and change requirements around uncertainty and unplanned business needs without any minimum monthly fees, no long-term commitments, no upfront licenses. AWS is truly a pay-as-you-go model, especially, for the services that we're talking about today. And so pay as you go essentially allows you to easily adapt those changing business needs, or in some cases on an hourly basis, right? So you have the ability to scale up, to scale down, to add users, remove users, and not have to worry about the scenarios where you're under provisioning or over provisioning. You're no longer having to build for peak. You're able to utilize the services when you need them. And if you don't need them, you can turn them off. And think about that agility in terms of how it can transform your current operations.
So these are really key. And I think the fundamental thing that we talked about with customers and customers can realize with AWS, especially, around these scenarios, is the agility. You don't have to worry about an upfront contract, planning ahead. Obviously, there's some capacity planning that still has to take place. The cloud, as large as it is, isn't infinite. But we have been able to support customers with the scale of onboarding 10s of thousands of users, petabytes of data, in very, very short periods of time, that really have allowed our customers to stay agile. And we and these are definitely benefits that you can take advantage of to support the current challenges as well as plan for the next challenges, whatever they may be. And so we'll talk a little bit more now about cloud desktop applications and content collaboration with Amazon WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0, and Amazon WorkDocs.
So, for me, a remote-worker scenario and some of the business challenges, some of the questions that you may be asking right now is how do you maintain continuity for business processes now that end users are working from home? I think that's number one on everybody's mind. And, of course, the question is how long does that have to continue? And is there a scenario where there is a new normal? When workers are coming back to be able to come into work, is that workplace going to be the same? Will there be the same capacity in office space? Will they be able to interact with the public in the same way, and continue those business processes? So there are likely going to be scenarios where change is taking place, regardless of whether those employees are working from home or working from a changed and modified office environment because of the challenges that everybody is facing.
Other questions like how do you quickly provision remote access? How do you have the flexibility to be able to provide an end user with the access to applications and resources they need without having to shift devices? And the other question, of course, is are those devices even available? We're seeing right now that there are runs on laptop devices and other physical devices. And so bring your own device has become really a key component of continuity, but you need to provide the immediate way to secure those endpoints and just provide secure resources remotely to those devices, wherever those users may be, wherever those devices may be. Having that done quickly is also key. And then how do you provide control and maintain control over sensitive data and prevent data loss and data leakage is a key requirement. And so there's there's a lot of concerns about that. And of course, our services can help address a lot of those challenges.
And so in addition to state and local government, operation, there's also education. And how do institutions provide continuity of learning by thinking about those computer labs that are in classrooms today, in school districts, on campus, in higher education? Those labs are obviously inaccessible right now. How do institutions provide continuity of learning when the computer lab is no longer available? And even when it becomes available again, will there be a scenario where that computer lab can support the same amount of capacity that it did in the past with things social distancing? Will there be scenarios where the students will be spaced out further, real estate will be under constraints to be able to support the number of students that are necessary? Will there even be consistent enrollment patterns with students coming back in the fall? Will students be attending classes online as a preference? Or will they want to come back to campus? Will they be able to come back to campus?
There's a lot of question marks about continuity of learning, and how do the traditional solutions for computer labs and access to learning resources, how does that manifest itself in this sort of new normal that we find ourselves in. And so certainly moving computer labs to the cloud can provide a lot of the flexibility that you need to be able to support students regardless of where they're located, and especially address the uncertainty around capacity. And so we think about this a few different ways. We think about this from a student perspective, from an educators perspective, and from an administrators perspective. From a student perspective, it really is about the ability, of course, to have the same level of access to real-world learning scenarios and applications that they would have in the classroom, or in a computer lab. The ability, of course, to utilize their own device. Even in a business-as-usual perspective, students tend to prefer accessing resources from their own devices. It makes them more productive. And, of course, they need to be able to access that anywhere at any time.
Educators need to be able to respond, and this is certainly no more true than right now, to changes in market forces and different directives. And also to be able to compete for students both on campus and at a distance. They need to be able to take and make most advantage of the real estate that they do have on campus. And inside the classroom, they need to be able to think about ways to optimize the time that students and teachers are interacting and eliminate challenges around things like technical support for a student to be able to access an application on their device to get through install issues, licensing issues. These are all challenges with the traditional computer lab, but they're definitely challenges now as there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of how students will be able to access these resources and how educators can provide them.
And then from an IT perspective, it's really just about keeping up with the changing demands. So really our services are going to be able to help students, educators, and administrators have continuity of learning to be able to access those resources and we'll provide some examples of those. In just a few minutes, we talk about some of the success stories from our customers in education. And so let's talk a little more about some of the services that are in play for remote work and remote learning. So Amazon WorkSpaces is our secure desktop as a service solution. With that service, you can have a mobile-user or a remote-user access applications that acts as a full-desktop experience. Any users simply need to download a client app for their device, whether that's going to be a Windows device, Mac, Chromebook, iPad, Fire tablet, Android tablet, and just about any other device with an internet connection or the web.
And essentially, users can connect using their named AD credentials, they can use multi-factor if you need it, and securely access a desktop environment that is located in AWS in a virtual private cloud that you define. And so, essentially, you control everything that that user can interact with once they are logged into their remote desktop session. WorkSpaces does provide a persistent experience for end users. And so when you think about workspace, the easiest way to think about it is it's a PC in the cloud. It lives as long as you need it to and is managed in place. It provides continuity in terms of applications, running state, it's backed up on a regular basis. It's essentially a PC that your users can access from anywhere at any time to continue being productive and securely working with applications and data on your network. And so WorkSpaces helps you eliminate a lot of the administrative tasks associated with managing desktop lifecycle, including provisioning, maintaining those devices, deploying them and also recycling them.
So all those traditional challenges around physical devices can be modernized and streamlined, with the ability to deliver a virtual desktop and desktop as a service. You'll spend less time managing hardware inventory. And let's face it right now, the hardware, even if you needed to ship it out, may not even be available to purchase and so there are supply-chain issues with physical devices. And so having the flexibility to utilize a workspace on a either a personally owned device, or a low-cost device, like a Chromebook or a thin client, provides you with a lot of flexibility in your organization to address changes in demand. Workspace is deployed, as I said, in a virtual private cloud. So every user is going to have access to a persistent encrypted drive or set of drives inside of their desktop. It does integrate with our key management service KMS in AWS.
And so, essentially, every desktop is secured. It's encrypted at rest with our encryption services, and is encrypted in transit all the way to the endpoint. So at the endpoint, all the user is receiving is an encrypted pixel stream. There is no data that is shared or transferred to the local device. So it provides security and prevents unauthorized data leaks and leakages of data and resources that are central inside of your environment today. So this provides a level of security that is above and beyond traditional VPN in laptop. You're not going to have a scenario where a workspace or a workspace on a device is left open or provides the ability for an attacker to access that data from the endpoint. The endpoint only receives encrypted traffic that does not remain on the device. And so it provides a level of security above and beyond the laptop and VPN for those secure processes that you need to be able to support.
It does centrally scale as well and it's available across our global regions, including our GovCloud region. So you can utilize WorkSpaces for a variety of use cases, including regulated workloads and data including CGS and other data that may be required, FedRAMP and other compliance frameworks, WorkSpaces is designed to support those levels of compliance. And we have organizations in state and local government and in federal government utilizing WorkSpaces to secure data and provide continuity for their remote users. It does reduce costs because WorkSpaces does eliminate the need to buy desktop and laptop resources. It also helps our customers either leverage their existing investments in virtual desktop infrastructure, or remove those investments when it makes sense to do so. And just think about the ability to stay agile and just pay as you go for the resources you need per user, either per month or per hour. So a lot of flexibility to help you think about modernizing your desktop estate and to immediately scale to be able to provide access to any number of users that you have, in a very short period of time.
AppStream 2.0 is, as I mentioned, our fully managed application streaming service. It does allow you the ability to remote any sort of business process that is centered around Windows-based applications, which can include business processes in local government and state government, as well as in education. And so Amazon AppStream 2.0 will allow any Windows-based application to be delivered to an end user either through a native client app for Windows or to the browser with nothing to install. And so the end user has the ability to access those applications remotely from any device and to be able to provide continuity for whatever processes that you need to extend. Think about AppStream for scenarios where you may not necessarily need a persistent, personal PC experience. Maybe it's just about providing access to specific applications.
And that kind of goes back to what I was saying early on about not being a one size fits all. You may have solutions today where you've got your email covered. You have any employee that can go to a online mail web application, access their email, access files and content. If you have those solutions solved, maybe there are so few applications in your environment. They could be a line of business apps, they could be ERP applications, they could be homegrown applications. Every organization has those windows-based applications that are essentially not available, at least today, in a software as a service model. And so you still need a way to remote those processes for end users, but don't necessarily need to provide VPN and a laptop or provide a full desktop, maybe it's just about those key applications that you need to extend. That's really where AppStream is going to be able to come in, especially in government. Be able to extend those specific application processes that are needed.
And we'll go through a few examples of it later on about how state and local government has been using AppStream to support key business processes and, especially, those education scenarios where you need the ability to extend Windows-based applications to Chromebooks, to Mac devices, to Windows, to just about anything the user has could provide continuity of those computer-lab resources for any user, anywhere, anytime. AppStream will, essentially, allow you to centrally manage your applications and so we have a concept of an image builder within AppStream where you can go in and customize and load your applications the same way you would on any Windows computer. That can be a manual process, or it can be fully automated. And then in a few clicks, you can capture that image, save it to a library of images inside of your AWS account, and then provision that image across a scalable fleet a virtual machine infrastructure.
And the key power of AppStream is the flexibility to scale up to support changes in demand on an hourly basis. And so if you have a typical eight-to-five, Monday-through-Friday process that you need to support, well, then you can run AppStream for that period of time and then turn it off when you don't need those resources. In addition, if you're looking to extend and create a virtual computer lab to be able to support students, you may be wondering, "Well, how much do I need? How many students are going to adopt this service or use it at any one time? How do I make sure I have a solution that is going to provide the flexibility that I need, especially in these times of uncertainty where you don't know what you don't know about student access and student engagement from a distance?" And so apps can can address that scenario.
Your computer lab today can be virtualized into AppStream. You load your applications, you link up your identity, services single sign-on and your Shibboleth or your Okta or your ADFS or other identity services. You link it up with storage, whether that's storage on premises, in the cloud, wherever students need to save their files. And then you provide that environment and you set it to scale based on changes in demand. And so you can create an environment where you're no longer having to worry about under provisioning or over provisioning, based on the adoption of the service. For a line-of-business scenario like a task worker accessing a line-of-business app, he may have more predictability around eight to five, Monday through Friday, and you can scale up and scale down to support those periods of time. But in a lab scenario and education, it may be much more unknown. You're providing an open-access environment for students to access, so you let AppStream scale for that and adjust automatically based on those changes in demand. And just pay for the resources that you need per hour and then a small user fee for each individual user that covers all the Windows client access licenses.
Very flexible solution that can help you address specific pain points around unique Windows-based applications that you may need to extend and support, as well as complete lab replacement for traditional computer labs and extending those to support remote access. And then our WorkDocs service is a service that allows users to securely store, share, and collaborate with documents anywhere at any time. And that can include external users as well. And so if you have processes that today that require you the ability to collect data from the public, for example, let's say there's forms or documents that need to be captured, think about WorkDocs as a repository, especially with its rich set of APIs where you can build processes to securely retrieve data from the public to be able to share that with key users or groups inside your organization that need to work with those files and documents. And to be able to have a platform that handles all of that securely, as a replacement for traditional file shares, and systems that maybe have been built for traditional public access in person. Where now you need something that can be digital, and can be modernized to support those processes anywhere, anytime, regardless of where those users are located.
And so with WorkDocs, you have the ability to store content, and really any type of file, inside of WorkDocs. Way our pricing is structured, every user inside of your organization gets one terabyte of storage capacity by default for a low fee. We also have a bundled offer with WorkSpaces. So if you are a WorkSpaces end user, you get 50 gigabytes of WorkDocs free of charge, and a terabyte for only $2 per user per month. So it's a very cost effective way, moving away from traditional file share services that you no longer have to maintain all that infrastructure and high availability. WorkDocs is back in our Amazon S3 object storage service, which is highly available and highly resilient to be able to support access across any AWS region. You can set storage limits for individual users and you can also extend to support remote external users. This will give them the ability to access resources. So whether you're working with shared-services scenarios, contractors, and the general public, you have a platform that can support both internal user use cases, as well as external use cases, whether those are guests, users, or users that need to interact and actually share data with your organization.
From an agility perspective, you have the ability to access and utilize Active Directory to manage your users. And so it's very flexible, it does integrate as well with multi-factor and single sign on, so you have flexibility to provide controls of how you want those users to access it. It is a compliant service, it is HIPAA eligible, it supports PCI, ISO compliance and additional compliance frameworks. I think distinction of WorkDocs versus other file-share services that are out there in the cloud is the data residency. You fully control the AWS region where you deploy WorkDocs, and you're going to control where that data resides 100%. We will never store data in a region outside of the region that we specify. So if you have requirements around data residency, data sovereignty, WorkDocs will help you maintain that continuity, and maintain that compliance when you deploy WorkDocs for various use cases. And it can start with a single user or scale to thousands of users in your organization.
Let's spend a few minutes talking about just some success that and I've pulled out a few key use cases that I think are relevant for this audience. Let me start by talking about Council Bluffs Community School District. So we had a chance to sit down with John Stile, who is a supervisor for network and user support at Council Bluffs. Earlier in May, they have been a user of AppStream for quite some time. But they were really in a situation, like most schools right now, where they needed to be able to provide continuity of learning for students that were enrolled in STEM and STEAM curriculum, utilizing Chromebook devices. In the state of Iowa or Council Bluffs, of course, is located, approximately 82% of students in Iowa in the various school districts are utilizing Chromebook devices. And most of those are in a take-home kind of one-to-one model.
So the ability to extend the applications for use cases and curriculum like Project Lead the Way, you'll access applications like Adobe Creative Cloud. Even in a traditional setting, when students are on campus, the desire and the flexibility of having the Chromebook be the device that can help students interact with those applications, which are obviously 100% Windows-based, means that you have more flexibility on how you can structure your computer lab spaces, how many students can participate in those programs, what you're basically doing is reducing the the physical costs of maintaining those environments. And so their challenge really was that, even if this was before COVID, while every student had a Chromebook, not every application, especially those key applications AutoCAD and Creative Cloud, were not available on those platforms. And so the school was spending as much as $100,000 per year per district to support those computer lab environments, with Windows PCs. And so AppStream really helped them transform that.
And so now, especially with this work-from-home and learn-from-home scenario that we're all facing, while other schools were shut down and not able to provide continuity, Council Bluffs was still providing the ability for students to continue learning and continuing down the track with Project Lead the Way curriculum, Adobe Creative Cloud. In some cases, those were seniors that needed to complete a certificate and complete that learning. And so they really provide continuity of learning with AppStream in lieu of a traditional computer lab setting, leveraging the Chromebook devices that they already had access to. And I think this is a consistent theme that we hear across K-12, is that Chromebook is prevalent. Right now, it's likely that 60 to 65% of every student in the U.S. has some access to a Chromebook device these days. So those are really entrenched in education. But there's a gap between those devices and what they can support.
And in the growth of STEM and CTE and career in technology learning means that you need a solution to provide equity for students and bridge the gap. And that's no more true than right now, where you have the need to provide continuity of learning and support those use cases anywhere on campus. And, of course, there's uncertainty about how's it going to look when schools have students return to campus? What's it going to look in the fall? Is it gonna stay online? Is it going to be staggered, virtual versus in the classroom? Whatever the case is, I think that schools that have the ability to put a platform in place to support continuity of learning, and stream those applications to any device, are going to be in a better situation to address that uncertainty, as well as reduced the cost of maintaining traditional computer labs in a K-12 environment.
Kind of moving on to talk about LA County. So LA, of course, has over 100,000 employees at the county. And, of course, with the stay-at-home order that took place in LA and across the country, the LA County internal services department, ISD, needed to provide a solution to support remote work for 100% of those employees. Like most organizations, they had a combination of software as a service. So they had online access to various applications for email collaboration. They also had some take-home devices and VPN for scenarios where those users had a device that could connect securely to the network, and to be able to access applications and data. But there were a large number of employees that did not have the ability to access any resources, nor did they have a device, nor could they quickly get those devices in the timeframe that was needed. And so the COVID-19 crisis really accelerated LA County's requirement to support, essentially, an incremental 80,000 employees, in essentially under a week, to be able to support a work-from-home scenario for key mission-critical applications across the county with various agencies and departments.
And so with AppStream 2.0, we were able to provide continuity. And really the AppStream service, in addition to other capabilities that were already being leveraged, gave LA County the ability to continue to support those services, and extend their remote service capabilities. The scalability of AppStream, the ability to scale up elastically to support large number of users, scale down periods of time where that usage is at a minimum, pay as you go, by the hour, gave the County the flexibility they needed to address this need. And, of course, going forward, it's likely the AppStream will continue to be a service that will provide the flexibility they need to support specific business processes that are mission critical for the county and for the 10 million residents in LA County.
And then Athabasca University is Canada's online research university. They, like most organizations, were faced with challenges around work from home. Now, of course, with Athabasca already being an online university, they already had processes in place to support students and online learning. But faculty and staff at Athabasca were only partially working remotely at the time the stay-at-home orders hit and so they, like many other customers, had to act very quickly to address the gap of the staff that had access to work remotely with a device versus the employees that had never worked remotely and they were always coming into the office to access the resources. And so Athabasca moved quickly with Amazon WorkSpaces to be able to utilize repurposed PC devices that were no longer suitable for direct use cases around stay at home, but were certainly capable of running the WorkSpaces client app to be able to access a cloud desktop and had the power and the capability and the security that they needed to be able to support remote work.
And so for the first time, within just a few days, they were in a position to support a 100% work-from-home scenario. And so that brings up a key point that we to look at when we talk to customers is really what is that endpoint strategy when you think about remote virtual desktops and applications? Are you going to ship the end user a device? Are you going to let the user utilize their own device? And likely a combination thereof. But in Athabasca case, they decided to look at some software and capabilities that are out there in the marketplace to allow you to repurpose older PCs and, essentially, transform them into managed endpoints that can be utilized to access cloud-based resources, like Amazon WorkSpaces or AppStream. And so those are solutions that are increasingly popular right now is because you no longer have to worry about leveraging the existing investments that you have in devices, but you can continue to utilize them. Of course, if a older laptop fails, it's very easy to replace.
And, of course, you also have the ability, if you so choose, to utilize it, bring your own device strategy as well. So a lot of flexibility when you think about how you can interact with cloud resources virtual desktops and apps. And so here's just a kind of a small example of three organizations both in K-12, higher education, and state and local government that have been able to utilize AWS desktop and app-streaming services to directly respond to the COVID-19 crisis. And likely going forward, these customers and many others will be in a situation where they have a platform to support unplanned events and be able to scale quickly to address those changing requirements. And so to get started, we do have a website that is set up specifically around these scenarios. It's aws.amazon.com/remoteworklearning. So you can go there and learn more about the services that we talked about today, learn about other customers that are being able to provide continuity of learning, continuity of work and business processes by utilizing these services.
And, of course, we continue to have some offers around the services. The ability to take advantage of some free offers to get started with Amazon WorkSpaces, to get started with services Amazon Chime, and many others. And so you'll be able to learn more about those specific offers. How to get started and, of course, look forward to hearing from you and look forward to supporting any of your remote work and learning needs during this difficult time. So with that, let me say thank you for supporting this conversation today. And thank you to Carahsoft for allowing us to meet with you today. I really appreciate. Thank you.
Thanks for listening. If you would more information on how Carahsoft or AWS can assist your educational institution, please visit www.Carahsoft.com or email us at aws@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.