Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

Today, AWS Educate announced the first cohort for the AWS Educate Student Ambassador Program. The AWS Educate Student Ambassador Program provides student leaders from around the world the opportunity to gain real-life experience while helping their peers gain valuable AWS technical skills to develop successful cloud careers. Through a competitive process that showcased member academic and extracurricular accomplishments, the selected inaugural cohort contains 326 members from over 50 countries and more than 250 higher education institutions.

Academic medical centers (AMCs) are under pressure to reduce costs, innovate at scale, and improve operational performance. To do this, they’re turning to the cloud. Two AWS Partner Network (APN) Public Sector Partners used the cloud to create solutions for AMCs that use large datasets to help advance medical research and analyze genomic data. Learn how these two partners are building solutions in the cloud to help AMCs further their mission.

Finding IT budget to drive new initiatives can be a challenge, especially for public sector organizations. Most public sector organizations use IT funds for foundational initiatives such as disaster recovery, supporting critical applications, or delivering key collaboration tools. As new priorities emerge, organizations might not have the funds to adopt new workloads or advanced technologies that address urgent, new, or emerging needs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cost optimization tools, services, and guidance to help public sector organizations lower cloud costs so they can better serve their stakeholders and achieve their missions.

In March 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on tools that support remote learning and teaching, cloud cost optimization, and achieving five nines in justice and public safety. Check out the top five blog posts of the month.

Data is an organization’s critical asset, which is why safeguarding it against ransomware attacks, natural disasters, emergencies, or technical failures is a top priority. Legacy data storage, such as tape, makes sharing and protecting data costly and time consuming. AWS released a series of educational webinars and whiteboarding videos that discuss how to raise the bar on data protection in the AWS Cloud.

Organizations around the world are making headlines after falling victim to ransomware attacks. Ransomware is malicious code designed to gain unauthorized access to systems and data and encrypt that data to block access by legitimate users. A newly released eBook, “Securing your AWS environments from ransomware,” shares who is at risk and why ransomware is effective, whether to pay or not pay the ransom, and how customers can automatically inherit certain security controls by building on AWS.

From accelerating genomics research to addressing the teacher shortage to improving commutes, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are fueling digital transformation in the government, education, nonprofit, and healthcare sectors. Austin Tanney, head of AI at Kainos, shared his ML learnings and where he sees the technology going.

To help the global education community during a period of increased remote learning, AWS Educate is launching an “Educator Mobilization” initiative to provide resources that support educators as they migrate to virtual instruction. Launching the week of April 6th, resources will include webinars hosted by educators who are members of AWS Educate with expertise teaching in online classrooms, as well as virtual office hours.

April 1 is Census Day 2020: the day everyone in the United States is counted. Household respondents to the U.S. Census are asked to count every individual living in their household as of Census Day. From representation in Congress to funding for local schools, roads, and emergency services, important decisions are made by the government based on census data, impacting those services for the next decade.

Over 28,000 school age children across the United States competed to name the Mars Rover 2020, but only one student’s name persevered. When the Mars Rover 2020 launches in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, it will be named Perseverance.