AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: AWS CloudFormation

How to deliver performant GIS desktop applications with Amazon AppStream 2.0

Geospatial datasets are increasingly large, reaching terabyte and even petabyte scale, which can cause many challenges for geospatial analysts and educators–but Amazon AppStream 2.0 can provide some solutions. In this blog post, we walk through how to deploy QGIS, a no cost, open-source geospatial information system (GIS) application used by geospatial analysts, in Amazon AppStream 2.0. We also load an example dataset to demonstrate how desktop GIS application users can access large, cloud-hosted geospatial datasets with high performance by keeping the data and compute components together on the cloud, and streaming the desktop application instead of downloading the data itself.

How nonprofits can automate tax-exempt status across AWS accounts

Many nonprofits and other tax-exempt organizations need to make sure their tax status is correct across their Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. A new tax analyzer solution automatically detects the tax status of all AWS accounts across an organization. In this blog post, discover how this simple solution identifies which AWS accounts across an organization are paying sales tax, and learn how this solution can quickly remediate tax status by opening an AWS support case automatically.

Canada’s Federal Geospatial Platform supports decision-making using AWS

Data has become a new global currency in the digital age, thus the capacity to turn it into useful information is becoming increasingly important. Geospatial data is collected and used by the Canadian government to support goals such as economic growth, environmental management, and social well-being.

How to scale and optimize Moodle LMS on AWS

Moodle is an open-source learning management system (LMS). Moodle has more than 300 million users worldwide across both academic and enterprise organizations, and is the world’s most widely used learning platform. There are many ways to get started with Moodle on AWS. In this blog post, I focus on how to scale and optimize Moodle once you are already serving students. In this case, you may need to deal with migrating data from an existing platform and making sure the new environment caters to thousands of students, and still be cost-effective — we cover additional considerations in this walkthrough.

NHS Digital launches NHS login with AWS

NHS Digital launched NHS login, a serverless identity platform to facilitate access to a range of health and care apps for residents in England, with AWS, amongst other suppliers. Using the AWS Cloud, NHS Digital achieves scale, high availability, and security for citizens accessing these services, and helps users access NHS services quicker and more simply. NHS login is one of a number of services NHS Digital are hosting on the cloud as part of the UK government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy.

How to build secure data lakes to accelerate your nonprofit’s mission

Using data lakes, nonprofits can use data to influence strategy and inform decisions that produce value and impact. In this post, learn how to build a data lake, ingest data from a PostgreSQL server, give permissions to users to consume the data using AWS Lake Formation, and access and analyze the data using Amazon Athena.

Service Workbench on AWS

Announcing Service Workbench on AWS: A fast and simple solution to create a collaborative research environment

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Service Workbench on AWS, a web portal for researchers to deploy domain-specific data and tools on secure IT environments in minutes not months. Customers can accelerate research while promoting repeatability, multi-site collaboration, and cost transparency in the research process. Tailored for researchers, Service Workbench helps quickly and securely stand up research environments for their work, allowing them to focus on the research not the technology.

Getting started with a healthcare data lake

Data related to healthcare, in both volume and variety, is undergoing a tremendous expansion. One of the best ways to tackle complicated data integration is through a data lake: a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. A data lake enables you to break down data silos and combine different types of analytics, such as data warehousing, big data processing, or operational analytics, to gain insights and guide better business decisions.

AWS Raise the Bar on ransomware

Raising the bar on storage: How to improve your disaster recovery, ransomware prevention, and backup strategy

Data is an organization’s critical asset, which is why safeguarding it against ransomware attacks, natural disasters, emergencies, or technical failures is a top priority. Legacy data storage, such as tape, makes sharing and protecting data costly and time consuming. AWS released a series of educational webinars and whiteboarding videos that discuss how to raise the bar on data protection in the AWS Cloud.

genomics DNA image

Tracking global antimicrobial resistance among pathogens using Nextflow and AWS

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.