Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

When upgrading a school district’s infrastructure, the administration thinks about the physical buildings as well as the IT. In 2018, Portland Public Schools began tackling both. The district is visibly renovating many of its high schools, but behind the scenes, they also migrated to the cloud, increasing both performance and capacity for their users.

Earlier this year, we announced Alexa Skill Blueprints, a way for anyone to create a variety of Alexa skills for personal use by just filling in the blanks. Now, we are adding the ability to publish skills created using Alexa Skill Blueprints to the Alexa Skills Store, so tens of millions of Alexa customers can discover, use, and review your skill. These new tools for content creators enable organizations to reach anyone with an Alexa-enabled device, simply by adding their content into an Alexa Skill Blueprint.

Georgetown University’s Hoya Hacks recently hosted a hackathon for social impact as part of the official Major League Hacking (MLH) 2019 season. Two hundred students from around the Washington, D.C, metro area spent 36 hours on campus building solutions on a variety of themes— gender equality, cybersecurity, digital forensics, and social innovation.

AWS Educate’s 11 foundational Cloud learning Career Pathways are now available in ten new languages – Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Bahasa. Now, more students around the world have access to the skills that will provide them access to cloud-based careers and opportunities.

After missing several elections as a graduate student living away from home, Seth Flaxman set out to build a reminder system alongside friend and classmate Kathryn Peters so no one would have to miss an election again. Energized by a vision to make voting a simple, seamless experience, Seth and Kathryn started Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to changing the status quo. Democracy Works set out to build the tools needed to upgrade the infrastructure of our democracy and improve the voting experience for voters and election officials.

To help countries realize the potential of Earth observations for sustainable development, we are teaming with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) to provide $1.5 million worth of cloud services for projects that improve understanding of our planet. Eligible government agencies and research institutions can apply for up to $100,000 of AWS Promotional Credits to build Earth observations applications that support environmental and development goals, including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The AWS Public Sector Blog has ramped up full-speed for 2019, bringing you stories of cloud transformations, security updates, scientific breakthroughs, and more. Check out the top five posts that had our readers talking in January.

Although more customers every day are using AWS to build, run and gain insights from data lakes, the journey to a data lake for many organizations can be one of uncertainty, and a path that may even seem too difficult to attempt. In this blog, we will discuss the challenges organizations can face with siloed data and how data from disparate systems can be brought together using data domains.

The use of robot mannequins to simulate human behavior has become an integral part of nursing education. As these simulations become more realistic, technicians and educators are challenged with creating environments that support student and nurse decision-making capacities in mid- to high-fidelity scenarios.

On January 22, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted Emergency Directive 19-01, “Mitigate DNS Infrastructure Tampering.” The directive states that the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is aware of multiple executive branch agency domains that were impacted by a DNS tampering campaign. The directive requires that by February 5th agencies must take four specific actions. For each action, we suggest guidance below for AWS customers.