Category: Customer Solutions

As schools and other educational institutions turn to remote learning solutions, organizations are reconsidering traditional IT infrastructure, aligning digital solutions to current learning and teaching models, and gearing towards the industry’s new measure of success: student engagement. A hybrid approach allows schools and districts to deploy both on-site and in the cloud, allowing staff and students to take advantage of productivity and collaboration services, to provide business and learning continuity. For more than a decade, To support critical learning applications and infrastructure during natural disasters and other disruptions, West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District chose to use VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) to extend its on-premises VMware vSphere environment.

Since universities typically face reliable bursts of traffic, such as on admissions day, they are not often concerned with the ability to scale infinitely—a key reason for going serverless. By doing so with AWS, the University of York now has the ability to scale down to zero, which helps the university better manage applications, reduce costs, and increase agility.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in the initial months of 2020, colleges and universities saw their regular learning plans upended. In many instances, in only a week, higher education institutions reconfigured their pedagogical infrastructure for hundreds or thousands of students with widely varying requirements and learning environments. Given the circumstances and the tight timeframe, it was natural for many schools to rely on their existing learning management systems (LMS) in order to transition to fully online learning. Learn how Simpson College went several steps further, leveraging its Moodle LMS not only to provide its courses but also to fuel success for students and the institution, and set up a new way of operating beyond the pandemic.      

As a result of COVID-19, the Jamaican Ministry of Education, Youth and Information (MOEY) selected One on One as the country’s official virtual school to expand online learning across the country. One on One Educational Services (One on One), a Jamaica-based, an e-learning solutions provider operating across the Caribbean, meets learners’ needs with their secure, resilient learning management platform built on AWS. The platform helped 44,025 students complete their school curriculum, despite the pandemic’s classroom disruption. One on One for Classroom® reached a peak of 12,000 students in attendance on a single day and 235,520 students in attendance throughout the entire period.

As education has shifted to remote delivery, traditional mechanisms for engaging students and creating practical learning opportunities have had to adapt too. One mechanism—the hackathon—is increasingly taking place virtually. Typically, hackathons are in-person technology events where teams or individuals create solutions to a specific problem or challenge in a short timeframe, often 24 hours or a weekend. Hackathons are also social learning events where peers can connect, learn from each other, seek support from technical experts, and produce a cool (even if imperfect) solution. Cloud technology tools and resources can help virtual hackathons be as successful as traditional hackathons.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released an interim rule, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Assessing Contractor Implementation of Cybersecurity Requirements (DFARS Case 2019–D041), which includes NIST SP 800-171 and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) assessment methodology and requirements. Organizations have been planning for CMMC, and with the release of this interim rule, are now beginning to prepare and build strategy for CMMC compliance. Learn how you can build your CMMC strategy using cloud technologies.

ECHO is a nonprofit, founded in 1981, equipping small-scale farming families worldwide with access to knowledge, seeds, and agricultural training. The organization teaches small-scale, sustainable farming methods so families can provide for themselves and their communities. They provide training in agricultural techniques globally, with centers in Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, and Florida in the United States, empowering small-scale family farmers to thrive.

Today more than 200,000 volunteers around the world are helping accelerate research toward COVID-19 therapies—by walking away from their computers. That’s because of a concept called distributed computing, which allows anyone with a home computer, laptop, or virtual machine to contribute computing power to a common cause. This month, nonprofit Folding@home has started sharing one of the world’s largest public protein simulation databases as an AWS Open Data Set so that researchers around the world can easily access this data to speed up the search for therapies for COVID-19.

At the fifth annual AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event—the first online—nonprofits from around the world shared stories of how technology came together in support of their mission to impact the communities they serve. The annual event brings together nonprofit leaders, technologists, and innovators to discuss how technology can help drive a positive impact for both people and the planet. Nonprofit speakers shared their journeys to solve for big challenges and how they’ve achieved their desired outcomes. Read on for more on what you missed.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems handle everything from accounting to marketing, finances to inventory, human resources to customer relations, and more. Colleges and universities commit significant infrastructure and personnel resources to run and manage these vital applications. But shifts in technology adoption, reduced availability of skilled labor, and increased economic pressures push colleges and universities to assess the return on their material ERP system investments. One way higher education institutions realize additional return on their scarce resources is by using cloud technologies. After Arizona State University (ASU) moved to AWS, the university was able to effectively allocate resources to benefit its students and solve operational problems that would otherwise require additional investment. Check out three benefits higher education institutions can recognize by moving ERP systems to the cloud.