Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

On Military Spouse Appreciation Day, we want to acknowledge the significant contributions, support, and sacrifices of military spouses worldwide. For military spouses, finding employment can be a challenge. To help prepare military spouses for roles in technology, Amazon offers no cost training for US military spouses, transitioning military, and veterans through its AWS Educate initiative.

Are you a U.S. government employee who is interested in learning about cloud computing? The AWS Training and Certification team is launching an another no-cost virtual series of foundational courses to help you better understand the AWS Cloud, relevant products, common solutions, and architectural best practices for the U.S. Government.

Chatbots and modern call centers provide governments with an efficient way to connect with citizens during critical times. Governments, health systems, and educational institutions are responsible for communicating and maintaining information portals regarding public safety, health and human services, emergency services, social services, and more. Now more than ever, communities are turning to their public sector organizations for up-to-date information. Read on to learn from organizations across industries and how they have scaled their services to meet increased demand.

For the first-ever Amazon Alexa EdTech Skills Challenge, AWS teamed up with SXSW EDU to challenge United States-based EdTechs to use Alexa to transform education. With six finalists remaining, the event is now virtual and the public can vote for their favorite. People who register to participate and vote will also be entered for a chance to win an Amazon Echo Show (2nd Gen).

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.