Teresa Carlson, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2020-12-15

Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector & Industries, AWS, talks with John Furrier for AWS re:Invent 2020.

#theCUBE #reInvent #AWS

https://siliconangle.com/2020/12/16/vaccines-work-life-harmony-prevail-public-sector-agenda-aws-teresa-carlson-reinvent/

Vaccines and work-life harmony prevail in public sector agenda for AWS’ Teresa Carlson

BY MARK ALBERTSON

Amazon Web Services Inc. had been in business for only four years when Teresa Carlson (pictured) signed on in 2010 to build a public sector practice for the aspirant cloud provider. The signature moment for her, and perhaps for the cloud industry as a whole, came nearly three years later when AWS and the Central Intelligence Agency signed a landmark $600 million cloud deal in 2013.

The business world took notice. If the cloud was safe enough for the CIA, it was probably going to be safe enough for industry.

The public sector business for AWS has grown significantly since then, to the point where analysts believe it is significantly outpacing the growth of AWS overall. In September, Carlson’s role as vice president of worldwide public sector and industries was expanded to include AWS sales in regulated verticals, including financial services, telecommunications, and energy, in addition to the firm’s aerospace and satellite venture announced earlier in the year.

“It’s been amazing building this public sector business,” Carlson said. “When my teams go into a country today, we generally have to work with all of these groups. It seems so natural.”

Carlson spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the central themes covered by Carlson in her re:Invent keynote, AWS initiatives to address the impact of COVID-19 in the workplace, closing the skills gap in the cloud computing industry, and the company’s pursuit of innovation for a wide range of regulated sectors. (* Disclosure below.)

Merging scientific data
Carlson’s keynote at this month’s re:Invent focused on twin themes of leadership and data. Both are intertwined when it comes to the central topic of the year: combatting a global pandemic.

Speaking at an AWS event earlier in the year, Carlson noted that COVID-19 was driving many federal agencies to dramatically accelerate migration to the cloud. At the core of that urgency was a need to gather and exchange critical research and health data from agencies across the world.

“During COVID we have seen the use of data go up like crazy,” Carlson said. “Think about economic data and health data, and putting those datasets together in a way to have deeper understanding of what’s happening within communities and states. We’ve seen a merging of data in a big way.”

In early April, AWS made a public COVID-19 data lake available as a centralized repository for global health researchers to use and analyze. It was part of an effort to support the rapid development of a viable vaccine, which is beginning to be deployed globally this month.

“Research has always been held tightly, and now we’re seeing them start to open up and share that data so we can move much faster,” Carlson said. “If you think about the [COVID-19] vaccinations, it would not have been possible to move this fast without the use of scalable compute, processing and analytics in a way like no one has ever seen.”

Impact in the workplace
The global pandemic has reshaped the workplace dynamic and one outcome has been a child-care crisis that significantly impacted women. According to a recent report jointly prepared by The Century Foundation and The Center for American Progress, four times as many women as men dropped out of the U.S. labor force in September.

The latest data underscored how the pandemic has exposed the lack of a child-care infrastructure or workplace policies that allow mothers to care for their children while continuing to be employed.

“Just in September, over 800,000 women left the workplace,” Carlson said. “That is a trend that we do not want and we cannot sustain. We want to make these programs fit for whatever the individual needs.”

The pandemic’s impact on the workforce has brought further attention to the number of open positions currently available in the technology industry. Carlson described how just before a recent television interview with a national media outlet, she checked a database and found 100,000 open cloud jobs in New York alone.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced a new program to train 29 million people globally in cloud skills by 2025.

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Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)