AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Compute

How Bucknell IT got 40 percent of their time back by moving ERP to the cloud

“Action cannot be completed because the system is out of date.” Every technology user understands the frustration of getting this message. When Bucknell University turned to the cloud to modernize their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, they found unexpected gifts along the way: more cost savings, better solutions, and best of all, new “found” time to devote to high impact projects.

Driving innovation in single-cell analysis on AWS

Computational biology is undergoing a revolution. However, the analysis of single cells is a hard problem to solve. Standard statistical techniques used in genomic analysis fail to capture the complexity present in single-cell datasets. Open Problems in Single-Cell Analysis is a community-driven effort using AWS to drive the development of novel methods that leverage the power of single-cell data.

UT Austin connects students with answers faster using Amazon Connect

The College of Liberal Arts at University of Texas at Austin wanted to make it simple for students, faculty, and staff to contact support agents. This is how they built and scaled a contact center solution on AWS with Amazon Connect that reduced call wait time, cut costs, and more easily resolved technical issues — all while call volume more than quadrupled.

Open data on AWS supports sustainable agricultural practices and crop optimization

With a rapidly growing population, the world is increasingly dependent on the ability to develop and maintain sustainable agriculture and healthy environments. Learn how BASF Digital Farming is leveraging both National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather data hosted on AWS, and commercial weather data, to develop digital solutions to help farmers effectively monitor and manage their fields, and help drive farm sustainability.

man with face mask getting vaccine from nurse with mask and face shield

Accelerating COVID-19 vaccine rollout with Zocdoc on AWS

With more than 1,400 different systems that healthcare providers use to run their scheduling, and millions of Chicago residents seeking a vaccine, a unified, citywide rollout for COVID-19 vaccinations is a challenge. Like many municipalities, early in the pandemic, the city of Chicago preferred to offer its residents a centralized find-and-book appointment system for COVID-19 testing, but other priorities and operational challenges prevented this. However, for vaccines, the team leading the city’s COVID-19 vaccination response was determined to deliver a more seamless experience for residents. The city used the Zocdoc Vaccine Scheduler built on AWS.

human genome

Accelerating genome assembly with AWS Graviton2

One of the biggest scientific achievements of the twenty-first century was the completion of the Human Genome Project and the publication of a draft human genome. The project took over 13 years to complete and remains one of the largest private-public international collaborations ever. Advances since in sequencing technologies, computational hardware, and novel algorithms reduced the time it takes to produce a human genome assembly to only a few days, at a fraction of the cost. This made using the human genome draft for precision and personalized medicine more achievable. In this blog, we demonstrate how to do a genome assembly in the cloud in a cost-efficient manner using ARM-based AWS Graviton2 instances.

Lake Michigan lighthouse

Modeling clouds in the cloud for air pollution planning: 3 tips from LADCO on using HPC

In the spring of 2019, environmental modelers at the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium (LADCO) had a new problem to solve. Emerging research on air pollution along the shores of the Great Lakes in the United States showed that to properly simulate the pollution episodes in the region we needed to apply our models at a finer spatial granularity than the computational capacity of our in-house HPC cluster could handle. The LADCO modelers turned to AWS ParallelCluster to access the HPC resources needed to do this modeling faster and scale for our member states.

Mineduc Digital app on a smart phone

Enabling remote education in Guatemala with scalable learning platform Mineduc Digital

AWS Partner ITZ Data, with support from UNICEF and the Canadian Embassy in Guatemala, helped Ministerio de Educación de Guatemala launch Mineduc Digital—the country’s first online platform where students can access digital self-study guides from any device connected to the internet. The Ministry implemented the solution in less than two months, paving the way for the digital transformation of their education system. The solution was built on AWS.

Encryption in transit for public sector

Encryption-in-transit for public sector workloads with AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Certificate Manager

Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.

two women working on laptop

People’s Association in Singapore improves upskilling experiences for communities

People around the world rely on continuing education and upskilling courses to build on their existing knowledge and learn new, industry-specific skills sets. In Singapore, Community Centres (CCs) and Resident Committees (RCs) offer a variety of upskilling courses for residents. CCs and RCs are part of the network of the People’s Association (PA), a Singaporean statutory board with a mission to build and bridge communities. To improve CCs’ and RCs’ time-intensive, manual process of course administration, PA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), launched a cloud-based web portal in November 2019.