Elections are among the most important administrative processes underlying our democracy, and they face an array of sophisticated threats designed to undermine system integrity and public trust. With AWS, election administrators and political campaigns are empowered to focus on the core needs of the electorate in a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way rather than building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure to support mission-critical efforts.
On behalf of AWS and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around how the cloud modernizes and simplifies elections. Where Michael Jackson, Leader of Public Health in US Elections at AWS will discuss three ways the cloud is modernizing US elections, such as security and compliance, voter engagement and elections management.
Michael Jackson: My name is Michael Jackson or affectionately known as MJ here at Amazon Web Services. I like to start with this quote from Trey Hilbert, oh, Tre Hargett excuse me, who is the Secretary of State in the State of Tennessee. He says, our department and its mission to exceed the expectations of our customers, the taxpayers and a customer centered environment has benefited from the expertise and collaboration of Amazon Web Services. That's a great jumping pad or launch pad into what it is we're going to speak about today. Our agenda is simple, I'm going to touch on four key trends or four key topics. The first is the new normal, talk about innovation specifically the way that Amazon defines it, the birth on AWS or the Amazon cloud. Secondly, we're going to talk about working backwards, one of our leadership principles and how that has allowed us to land on three very distinct categories of offerings that align with trends in the market today. Third, we're going to talk about AWS elections specifically, like I said, the vertical or the industry business within AWS, that I lead for our State and local government customers.
Michael Jackson: And then finally, bias for action, another one of our leadership principles, but in this context it really means what are we going to do next? How do we enable you to take the next steps and define efforts that you can make in trying out how the cloud may be applicable to your elections workloads? So I keep mentioning, or I've mentioned at least several times our leadership principles. There are 14 of them, but I won't go through all 14, but this quote was taken from one of our early investor relations feedback or documents. And it's a quote that has been attributed to Jeff Bezos. And he said from the very beginning that we've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years and that's the reason we're successful. And I like to think about these three areas as it relates to categories that you can put out leadership principles in.
Michael Jackson: The first, is putting the customer first, or as we refer to in the LPs in leadership principles, customer obsession. Everything that we do is typically generated from working backwards from the customer and directly incorporating feedback that we get from our customers. The other 10% is our interpretation of what we feel like would raise the bar on making our solutions even better. The second is invention, we are proudly a company of pioneers, and we like to think that if we see an area that we can positively disrupt, or there's a gap, we like to create solutions where there are non and fill needs with the capabilities that we offer. And finally, being patient, forgoing short-term profits or gains for the ability to really incorporate long-term disruption or improvement. And it's okay for us to be misunderstood for long periods of time, if we're able to measure the progress that we're making toward that original goal. So that leads me to the story of how Amazon Web Services came to be. How did we move from fulfillment centers to data centers?
Michael Jackson: Well, in 1996, amazon.com was born, selling books exclusively. And the short version of the story goes like this. During the first 10 years of its existence, there was exponential growth year over year. And to accommodate that growth and unique situations that the company found itself in, amazon.com started to look for vendors who could help with secure collaboration. What ultimately became known as microservices and shared resources at the time, nothing like that existed. And so the company created like I said, what we call micro architectures, microservices, and the ability to securely collaborate via the internet. What ultimately became known as cloud computer. In 2006, Amazon Web Services was born and to this day, we still do just that for our customers. We offer scalable access to IT resources via the internet, securely, scalably and in a pay as you go utility model.
Michael Jackson: Now, drilling a little deeper, we're going to talk about elections specifically, but before we get down into the AWS elections vertical, I like to talk about ways that Amazon Web Services is being used in general. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, from the smallest of Counties to the federal government, we like to refer to cloud computing as the democratization of innovation. In other words, it allows access to the same technologies, the same innovations, regardless of the size of your organization, and you really only pay as you go. So what that means is based on the size of your workload, that will determine the costs to your organization. Regardless, it's still much more cost effective than building it and maintaining it yourself, but it still allows for access, from like I said, the smallest of startups, to Fortune 500s, from the smallest of Counties to federal and national government agencies.
Michael Jackson: Now, when we talk about elections specifically, there are many customers across the country that are leveraging Amazon Web Services, either directly or through our partners. We like to break our customers into one of three segments, and what you're looking at here is an illustration or a representation of those three segments. The first is political campaigns. And you can see here that we work very closely with the DNC, the RNC, as well as the Federal Elections Commission, the FEC, which is not depicted here and many very popular campaigns from the Obama campaigns to others. These are all publicly referenceable case studies that you can download or access online as well. Another segment, the third on your screen is civic organizations. Now, these are organizations whose mission is primarily just to get out the vote, to mobilize the electorate. And again, you see several actual customers represented on here, rock the vote, the league of women voters.
Michael Jackson: The segment we're going to focus primarily on today though, is the one in the center, elections administrators at the State and County level. County of Alameda in California, the State of Georgia, the State of Tennessee, again, publicly referenceable customers, but we have many others. For example, there's the State of Rhode Island, there is the State of New Hampshire. So I mentioned during the introduction that we were going to talk about trends and working backwards, and that's something that Amazon Web Services and all of Amazon actually prides itself in doing. Working backwards from the customers and the challenges that they face and backing into offerings that could help to correlate and accelerate efforts to address those challenges. So what you're looking at now are just three trends that we found bubbling up on the priority lists of our customers. The first trend has to do with election integrity and cyber attacks. During the 2016 presidential election, there's no secret now, there was foreign interference.
Michael Jackson: There was attempts from foreign adversaries trying to impact, or at least access our election infrastructure. As a result, in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security, added elections' infrastructure to it's lists of classified critical sectors. What that means is there are 16 sectors of infrastructure in this country, including utility grid, public health, and now elections as a part of that, these are infrastructures that have been deemed integral to the operation of our democracy. The second trend is demographic shifts in the US electorate. What's represented here is that as of 2018, for the first year ever, all millennials were eligible to vote based on their age, along with that, when they come to the polling station or go to access information related to voting and elections, they bring expectations on how intuitive and immersive those interactions should be. And that's just one sub sector or one block if you will, of the US electorate, one demographic block. We also have a number of baby boomers every year in this country, 10,000 people celebrate their 65th birthdays.
Michael Jackson: It's very important to understand that the US electorate is dynamic and its demographics are shifting. And so when you think about engaging those voters, those are factors that should obviously be considered. The third trend is our aging infrastructure. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act was passed after the 2000 election of Gore versus Bush, $4 billion were allocated for modernization of elections infrastructure at that time in 2002, the final 10% was released in 2018, that was $380 million. So every State received at least $3 million for elections modernization efforts, but even still some States believe that that is not enough. An additional 400 million, 425 million was approved in 2019 dedicated or allocated, I should say, specifically for election security. So this speaks to the aging infrastructure and the need to address and modernize and scale the infrastructures that handle, what many would argue is the most integral workloads of our democracy. Working backwards from those trends, we found that there are three categories of solutions that fit or that correlate, I should say to each one of those trends. We'll get to those in a second.
Michael Jackson: But first I'll speak to generally how elections administrators are using the cloud to modernize their elections. How are the States and the Counties leveraging that HAVA money, the Help America Vote Act funds that were approved in 2018. We find that they are allocating it towards improving security, voter experience, agility and speed. So for agencies who have on staff developers, custom building solutions that address their unique needs, it's really important that they're able to deploy systems quickly, resilient, failing fast, understanding where their gaps lie and addressing them quickly, and doing it in a way that only the cloud could provide. Analytics, costs and innovations are other benefits also that derive from a cloud usage. From a very high level, for those who are not extremely familiar, this is a representation of what the cloud enables in a very scalable, secure, and cost-effective way. Across a number of channels, we accelerate data ingestion, we enable storage and compute within the cloud environment. And then what happens oftentimes is big data analytics, machine learning or artificial intelligence is able to either make personalized recommendations to resources or pull insights out of larger positories of data in real time.
Michael Jackson: Getting back to the use cases that correlate with the trends though, these are the three categories that correspond to the three trends that we spoke about. So under security and compliance, you see that's the first tire board. We have a list of services. I'm going to talk specifically about all the services, but just know that the first category is security and compliance, and it speaks to ways that we help to protect, modernize, and detect any vulnerabilities or intrusions, and then mitigate damages after the fact. But for now, just know that category one, the security and compliance. The second category is voter engagement, which speaks to the seismic shifts in the US electorate. And then the third is elections management, or more specifically, we like to call it non-voting election technology. Across all three, it's most important for our customers to be able to measure the effectiveness of their solutions. And that's what analytics enables, so that customers can see how they are performing against their desired outcomes and at various milestones, they can check to see if they are performing or effectively achieving the goals that they set out to do with their modernization efforts.
Michael Jackson: So first up, security and compliance. Now, although we have a number of internal audits to help ensure that we are as secure and compliant as possible, we also rely on audits based on standards, many of which you see on the screen here. From CJIS to HIPAA, FedRAMP to Nist, we adhere to a number of standards in the US and around the globe, 6,500 customers around the world, I should say 6,500 government agencies around the world, trust Amazon Web Services in some fashion. And this just gives a brief example of why. Expanding on that thought and you can see literally around the world, we adhere to security and compliance standards that enable us to work confidently with government agencies internationally, as well as in the US. Now, we'll talk a little bit about the shared responsibility model, what that means, its basic definition, is that at the hypervisor or down, and that's the delineation between what we're responsible for versus the customer.
Michael Jackson: So you can see that AWS is responsible for securing the infrastructure or the cloud itself, if you will. And that includes the compute storage databases, the software that serves as the operating system for our infrastructure and all of the regions, availability songs and edge locations that we maintain. The customer, however, is responsible for their share as well. And that includes the customer data, the platforms that are built on AWS, the operating systems for that data in their various VPCs, as well as any server side encryption, networking traffic, et cetera. So at the highest level, this is the definition of our shared responsibility model, but even still, we offer tools that make it easy for customers to manage the responsibilities on their side, as well. From networking and encryption, to identity and management and compliance, we have tools that make it easy to automate and manage the customer side of that shared responsibility.
Michael Jackson: One such example is Amazon Guard Duty. Now, like I said before, I don't like to go too deeply into product names at such a high level overview. But what I'll do is just give you a couple examples of how threat and intrusion detection can be very handy in scenarios, such as elections. In addition to securing the infrastructure itself, imagine you have a password on a post-it note, not a very good security practice, but let's say you leave that post-it note on your desk or stuck to the side of your computer monitor and someone who shouldn't have access to your account, finds your password and they log in as you on a different machine or in a different time. And suddenly they start to explore, they start to access things that you wouldn't normally access. They start to print off reams of documents that you wouldn't typically print off. They have atypical activities that would not normally be represented by your account.
Michael Jackson: Well, that could be an anomaly or it could be nefarious activity. And so we have solutions that will identify that atypical activity and then set off a number of predetermined actions as configured by the customer. We could temporarily block access, we could ring an alarm and let IT administrator know, there are a long list of actions that could be taken. But again, this is just to mitigate damages from accessing an account with valid credentials, but demonstrating atypical activities. It's just a way to monitor those types of threats. Another example is even though by default, our infrastructure is what we call lockdown and very secure by default, your S3 buckets, your containers, your folders by default would be locked out. But if an administrator inadvertently opens up access to a public container, and that container holds PII, personal identifiable information, like social security number, for example. Well, we have tools that can scour those folders, those buckets, those containers for data in the format of a social security number, right? Three digits, a dash, two digits, et cetera.
Michael Jackson: And if it's not password protected, if it's in a publicly facing bucket, that's not password protected, again, we can identify that automatically, take predetermined, pre-configured steps, or in order to mitigate damages, we could just let the administrator know. So not only do we help to protect against the traditional, what you may perceive as a bad actor, a hacker, if you will, there are also threats that exist that could potentially be an inadvertent or from inside unauthorized access of passwords and other credentials. And so across the board, we work with our customers to help mitigate all sorts of risks. Another one of our offerings is what we call the GovCloud. Now, our typical infrastructure is compliant according to FedRAMP moderate with the US GovCloud it's FedRAMP high. So in addition to that added level of security on our side, only US citizens on US soil are managing infrastructure on behalf of AWS. So oftentimes that is a very high priority when it relates to US elections workloads as well.
Michael Jackson: Now, let's talk about our second category or voter engagement. This is the second category of solutions, again, like I mentioned before, which correlates to the trend of seismic shifts in the US electorate. Not only are we going to talk a little bit about engaging it, but also accessibility. Now, the way administrators or elections officials in the past would do capacity planning, ahead of time they would look at their server capacity and based on previous numbers of hits on their infrastructure. For example, it's taken an election night reporting solution or website, based on the number of hits that the website took in previous elections, that would help them to estimate the capacity required for an upcoming election. And they would often plan with a little bit of a buffer to allocate or to estimate just a small percentage increase above the previous election. Now, we all know with elections, it's not like a sales cycle. Those are unpredictable enough on their own, but elections are even more unpredictable, particularly in 2020, when we are expecting one of the largest turnouts ever with our US elections.
Michael Jackson: And so when doing traditional capacity planning, if you under estimate, and there's not enough capacity to accommodate all of the voters and other stakeholders who will be accessing your infrastructure for various reasons, what happens is the infrastructure crashes, the website crashes, and ultimately you have a very poor experience. So I won't even touch on a recent example that we're probably all aware of that had nothing to do with Amazon Web Services. But that clearly is an example of what happens when we have poor capacity polling or a host of other issues. Now, if you overestimate, you're essentially leaving money on the table, that's when you have more capacity than needed. Now, granted, that's probably the lesser of the two evils, but it's not cost-effective at all. And that means you're investing in infrastructure that essentially goes unused. And if it's on-prem, it amortizes almost immediately, it depreciates almost immediately I should say.
Michael Jackson: However, with AWS, we can do capacity or we can accommodate the need for capacity with no planning at all. This is what we call auto scaling. The infrastructure is flexible and elastic and adapts in real time, based on the needs or the demands of the infrastructure. So capacity always meets demand. You're not leaving money on the table, nor are you under investing and providing a poor experience to the voter. Now, in addition to the simplest of use cases, which is what we just covered, as it relates to the voter experience or voter engagement, that was an election night recording example. More complex and probably even more relevant today is what we call Omni channel experiences. This is, as an example, a very recent example because we're working with the State of New Hampshire as they prepare to celebrate the 100th anniversary of being the first in the nation primary election. And this is a very new, very recent, approved public facing use case.
Michael Jackson: So what the State of New Hampshire wanted to do was to take stock of all the types of information, all the different types of queries that may be requested of them as voters prepare to head to the polls. So they made a list of all the types of questions that may be asked from where's my mail-in polling place? Who's on my ballot? How do I register? You name it. Just a long bulleted list. Similarly, they made a second bulleted list of all the channels through which a voter may make those inquiries. Some voters may prefer to get their information from a website, others through a mobile app, others still may prefer to dial into a call center, opt in for text messaging, ask Alexa using their voice. This is just a small sample of the bulleted channel options that we went through in this exercise. Others still may prefer to interact using a chatbot within a website, right? So there are a long list of options.
Michael Jackson: The goal though, is to extend an experience with information that is equally accurate, interactive, intuitive, and experiences that are equally immersive regardless of the channel, through which a voter chooses to access his or her information. And this is when we get into accessibility as well, because sometimes the choice is not a matter of preference. For example, a voter who's visually impaired may opt to leverage voice and Alexa, not because of preference, but because of need. Similarly, we have a number of voters who may speak other languages and they need to access that same content in a second language or a different language I should say, regardless though, the content should be just as accurate, just as secure, validated, and intuitive to interact with. So that's what we mean by an omni-channel voter experience. And what you're looking at on the screen is a broad set of capabilities that enable on the backend, an infrastructure to recommend content based on a number of factors in real time to offer an immersive intuitive experience.
Michael Jackson: Here we talk about personalization. Now, content should be, I like to say standardized when we're talking about loader content. It's the same concept when you're dealing with commercial organizations, when we talk about personalization, but even still though, when you think about it, depending on your address, that would determine the answer to a question when you ask Alexa where you should vote, for example. So even to a degree, personalization is very relevant as well, whether we're talking about content discovery, if you're looking for information on your favorite candidate. For example, if you ask Alexa today about a particular candidate or the endorsements that they've received, at a national level, you will get an answer to your question. And we're working at more granular levels either directly or through our partners to answer questions that are relevant to your precinct, your jurisdiction, your County, or your State as well. But like I said, even today through our partners on the Alexa tool, you're able to identify who's on national ballots, understand the positions that candidates have taken, who is endorsing them. And even through Amazon Pay, you're able to make political contributions.
Michael Jackson: Again, it's all about the customer experience, the omni-channel experience across channels, making recommendations about the type of content based on the number of items known from previous interactions. And that's all powered by automated machine learning or serverless computing, which is a service called Lambda, which powers Amazon Alexa and Amazon Lens. Now, the third category of solutions, elections management, like I mentioned before, the way we define it on our side is what we call non voting election tech. And so when you think about it, so many technologies are incorporated or so many, I should say use cases and workloads are incorporated in the processes that make up elections aside from the actual casting and counting of ballots. Use cases include examples like campaign finance reporting, election night reporting, online voter registration, ebalance, epollbooks, a number of those types of services and use cases are comprised under the umbrella or the category that we refer to as elections management. And through either direct relationships or through a comprehensive network of partners that we have across the US, we're able to help our State and local government customers deliver and modernize those types of workloads.
Michael Jackson: One such example is Alameda County in California, the AWS infrastructure performed flawlessly, and we were confident it could handle the load. There were no performance issues and 80% of users accessed election maps on mobile devices. If we had gone the traditional route, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars with no guarantee that it would even work. And we would have been paying for that infrastructure all year long. So that speaks to the capacity planning that I spoke about previously. And this is from Tim Dupuis, who's the CIO and registrar from Alameda County, California. So we have, like I said, very effective relationships with our State and local government customers, some direct, many through our partners and the ecosystem that we're building there. In either case, we either work directly with our customers or we empower solutions that our partners have built on the AWS infrastructure. So that value can be derived from data and constant improvement can be made in the solution itself.
Michael Jackson: When you have a central repository of data and from that central bucket of data, a number of actions can be taken, insights can be gleaned and protection and security can be improved. Ways that we work directly with our customers to fulfill election data design criteria from the ability to protect and secure critical data to the storage for a variety of data types and lifecycle management requirements. The cloud is almost made for these types of workloads. Scalable solutions for cyclical demands is what the cloud was basically intended for. We also offer reference architectures, so for those customers who do have developers who are looking to custom build their own applications and solutions such, as the case was in Alameda County or for our partners again, who are building their solutions on top of the AWS infrastructure. We work with them to ensure that their architectures are well-reviewed and secure before scaling to our elections customers. This is just one example of a reference architecture for data ingestion. So mainly we offer them for storage management and for analytics.
Michael Jackson: For voter registration databases, the same thing. There are a number of options available to help modernize the voter registration databases, which were mandated across the country a number of years ago. And we help to modernize the implementation of those registration databases as well. I told you, we like to think about bias for action and actually define or propose I should say, what an engagement with AWS would look like. The first we offer the option for us to come out and conduct a complimentary election workshop. On-site with our customers, we have a local sales team, or I should say we have a national sales team with local representation all across the US, with solutions architects and other resources. And we'd be happy to come out and conduct a complimentary workshop onsite such as the one that I gave an example was New Hampshire and how we did that life boarding exercise to come up with their new implementation for voter engagement, as they celebrate their 100th anniversary of being first in the nation. They actually launched an Alexa scale, they modernized their voter portal with an option for opt in text messaging notifications for their voters.
Michael Jackson: There's again, a pretty comprehensive case study that will be available very shortly. They just announced it recently at the NASS conference, National Association of Secretaries of State. So it's a very new use case, it's a very newly approved public reference, but that is just one example of the types of solutions that will resolve from an onsite elections workshop. Similarly, we've got examples with other customers across the country. The next step after accessing, if our customers choose the route of migrating data directly into AWS or working directly with us, we have plans that help to identify based on prioritization, which data workloads would be or could be your first choice based on validated cost savings and risk assessments, et cetera. Also, another option that's not represented on the screen is what we call a proof of concept. For little to no cost, we can actually take sample data or actual data based on the customer's preference and demonstrate the art of the possible.
Michael Jackson: We could show you in a very limited scale, very limited scope, what we're proposing could be implemented, leveraging the power of the AWS cloud. And then based on satisfaction can work to implement active production workloads, leveraging the same architectures. And then finally, we have execute, execute a migration roadmap, onboarding data to AWS with enhanced data management capabilities. Our data life cycle management is just one example. And that's, again, if you're engaging directly with AWS. If you have the need for just what we call a single solution or acquaint solution, maybe you only need epollbooks, or maybe you only need online voter registration. Again, we have a comprehensive network of partners who are able to offer secure, scalable solutions that have been hosted and vetted by Amazon Web Services as well. So with that, I will wrap it up and I feel like I've given a lot of information to the attendees here. Thank you everyone.
Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on how Carahsoft or AWS can assist your organization, please visit www.Carahsoft.com or email us at aws@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.