The public cloud is increasingly becoming safe for public-sector entities. The U.S. Department of Defense has joined the Central Intelligence Agency to entrust some of the most-sensitive data on earth to cloud providers. With these two reassuring examples, state and local governments are also wading into cloud, but not without some growing pains.

Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Worldwide Public Sector segment is growing 41% year over year, according to Teresa Carlson (pictured), vice president of WWPS at AWS. State and local agencies make up a sizable portion of incoming customers. “That has been a super-surprising market,” Carlson stated.

Carlson spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed AWS’ progress with state and local agencies, as well as the company’s latest space and innovation programs (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud-consumption class in session

During 2018, state agencies like Medicaid move massive, mission-critical workloads out of legacy data centers into AWS. Justice and public-safety entities are also moving in surprisingly high numbers to the AWS GovCloud, which allows U.S. government agencies to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing specific regulatory and compliance requirements, according to Carlson. Agencies such as these find the cloud consumption model — generally seen as a plus — dauntingly unfamiliar.

AWS is tackling these “acquisition barriers” by educating agencies on how to switch from upfront capex to cloud’s pay-as-you-go model.

Many states still don’t understand the ins and outs of buying and using cloud infrastructure, Carlson pointed out, because they are used to legacy technology acquisition models that required that they pay upfront.

“These models were like, ‘Pay me a lot of money up front, and then let’s hope we’ll use all that technology,'” she said.

The benefit of trying technology first, then scaling and paying more as needed should be obvious. However, many states find the practice foreign and are now tapping AWS to educate them and their acquisition officials about it.

“It‘s nice when they’re asking us for help in areas where they see their own blockers,” Carlson said. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

 Photo: SiliconANGLE