Category: Database

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions that operated on in-person model shifted many of their traditionally in-person operations and activities—including grading, assessments and testing, and admissions—to a virtual format, where many had never been before. Educational technology (EdTech) companies around the world used the cloud to help quickly create and scale to meet the needs of these academic institutions while maintaining a consistent and smooth student experience.

Moving to AWS helped The University of the West Indies, Open Campus (UWIOC) improve performance of systems and operational efficiency while optimizing costs. Learn how UWIOC migrated more than 70 virtual machines, 10 applications, and five networks, plus their Moodle learning management system (LMS) and the UWIOC website, while saving 50 percent total cost of ownership along the way.

University College London’s (UCL) virtual learning environment, built on the Moodle learning management system, is at the heart of its digital education infrastructure and used by students all over the world. Before migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its system could handle 2,500 concurrent users. But when the pandemic drove schools and universities to predominantly online teaching, the UCL team wanted to support six times this amount in just 10 weeks. Here’s how they did it with AWS.

Predictive maintenance solutions involve using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and data analytics tools to monitor operations, detect anomalies, and predict possible defects or breakdowns in equipment before they happen. To help keep aircraft mission ready, the Air Force turned to PavCon, LLC, (PavCon), a woman-owned small business, to create an actionable predictive maintenance solution powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Using AWS, Edunation seamlessly responded to increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Edunation collaborates with top educational institutions across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and provides all-in-one learning and school management solutions. Today, the EdTech is on a mission to push learning management systems (LMS) beyond virtual classrooms.

The era of the cloud has simply accelerated the push to microservices as organizations want to adopt new, distributed models for building applications to drive agility, innovation, and efficiency. The AWS portfolio of purpose-built databases can help with this movement. AWS offers a broad and deep portfolio of purpose-built databases that support diverse data models and allow customers to build data driven, highly scalable, distributed applications. This allows you to pick the best database to solve a specific problem and break away from restrictive commercial databases to focus on building applications to meet the needs of their organization.

Increasingly, central banks want to answer practical questions and make the technology choices involved to deliver a central bank digital currency (CBDC). They need a solution that delivers on their missions and meets the performance criteria required to support a stable monetary and financial system. To help organizations understand available technology options and see how cloud services can enable optimal solution designs, AWS authored a two-part whitepaper. Here are some of the highlights.

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.

COVID-19 highlighted the existing shortage in personnel within healthcare and is now challenging many hospitals with high staff turnover and sick leave. Planerio created workforce management solutions that help healthcare organizations modernize their workforce administration. Their shift planning software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and takes into account a range of planning variables such as employee qualifications and availabilities, employee preferences and requests, requirements of different shifts and workplaces, legal regulations and tariffs, and more.

iCivics is the education nonprofit that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded in 2009 to transform civic education and rebuild civic strength through digital games and lesson plans. It is the country’s largest provider of civic education content and is currently used by more than 120,500 educators and 7.6 million students annually. All of its games are free, nonpartisan, and available at www.icivics.org. Through their use of Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS CodeDeploy—and AWS security automation tools including AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon GuardDuty—iCivics has been able to scale and increase student engagement.