AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Scott Glasser
Scott is a principal solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He enjoys helping nonprofit research organizations use technology to make a positive difference, and has particular interests in public policy and bioscience.
Frugal architecture in action: The Urban Institute innovates with R and Serverless on AWS
Nonprofit organizations are typically frugal and responsible. They strive to improve the human condition in innumerable ways, yet they cannot raise capital like a commercial organization, so they have to make the most of the resources they have. They apply that frugal approach to IT: they build and operate only what they need to pursue their mission, and constantly innovate both to meet mission objectives and optimize cost. Even with these constraints, nonprofits aspire to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, and often, they use innovative IT architectures on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to do it.
Combating illicit activity by tracking flight data via the cloud
Many organizations including the intelligence community, security organizations, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, news organizations, and non-governmental organizations work together to disrupt transnational crime networks. Their missions include combating illicit trade; disrupting human, animal, and narcotics trafficking; detecting money laundering; and exposing political corruption. This community needs rapid analysis of large, diverse streams of information about air transportation networks, because air transportation is the fastest way to conduct illicit trade internationally. The nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) built the Icarus Flights application to meet this need. By building on AWS using managed cloud services, C4ADS spends less time and energy managing infrastructure, which frees them to focus on building innovative analytics and alerting services that their user community needs.