Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

AWS CloudFormation templates are now available for nonprofit organizations to deploy a production-ready REDCap environment in 20 minutes, increasing researchers’ agility and reducing the cost of electronically capturing research survey information. This automation deploys the latest REDCap software on secure, highly available AWS infrastructure and includes the ability to utilize the REDCap “Easy Upgrade” feature. With this automation and architecture, researchers can deploy and manage REDCap with a click of a button, without the need for specialized IT skills

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has awarded PROTECTED certification to AWS. This is currently the highest data security certification available in Australia for cloud providers on the Certified Cloud Services List (CCSL). With this new certification, public sector organisations can easily store their most highly sensitive workloads in the AWS Cloud.

It’s no surprise that organizations are worried about becoming locked in to their cloud provider. After all, the history of IT is full of examples of vendors taking advantage of high switching costs to impose restrictive licensing terms and to increase prices. But the cloud is different—and in fact, is making it harder and harder for software, hardware, and IT service vendors to take advantage of the leverage that they have had in the past.

Are you a U.S. federal government employee or contractor who is interested in learning about cloud computing during the government shutdown? We are offering the popular AWS Technical Essentials Day virtually to government workers interested in learning about the cloud. This instructor-led course will be offered online on January 24th and 31st.

The City of Baltimore is collaborating with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudStart program to develop solutions to serve the city and citizens of Baltimore. AWS CloudStart supports Economic Development Organizations (EDOs) by providing resources to educate, train, and embrace the cost-effective options that AWS cloud computing services can offer to organizations that are serving customers in the government, education, and nonprofit space.

Many west coast Canadian customers, such as Vancouver International Airport and BC Hydro, are using the AWS Cloud to save money and better serve citizens. But it doesn’t stop there. Hear firsthand from some of our Canadian customers about their cloud journey. Here’s what they had to say on some key topics – transformation, security, and customer centricity.

This week, the bipartisan Open, Permanent, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act officially became law in the United States, requiring that non-sensitive data produced by US federal agencies be made publicly available in non-propriety and machine-readable formats by default. We have long supported this legislative proposal since it was first introduced in 2016, and commend both the Congressional leaders and the Administration for their commitment to making open data a priority.

Microsoft SQL Server® is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. AWS offers you the flexibility to run Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

At the 2018 AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, AWS made many new product announcements that could transform government, education, and nonprofit missions and operations. Below is our curated list of the top ten takeaways from re:Invent 2018 for you to try this year.

Enterprises, nonprofits, and startups around the globe are using the cloud to accelerate innovation in geospatial workflows to respond to natural disasters, fuel precision agriculture, plan city infrastructure, provide weather forecasts, and drive a myriad of other purposes. We convened an Earth on AWS session at the 2018 ESA Φ-week event, with presentations and discussions from experts showing how they’re using the AWS Cloud to unlock value from geospatial data and learn more about our world.