Category: Education

Azavea believes in the power of geospatial technology to improve communities and the planet. Azavea has been exploring the power of this technology to help their clients to answer complex questions in a wide range of domains from urban ecosystems, infrastructure planning, and economic development to water, energy, and climate change. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Jessica Cahail, product manager at Azavea, to share how her organization is using AWS and open data to develop tools that help users address environmental challenges and deliver knowledge to support decision making.

Monitoring and tracking student and staff exposure to COVID-19 and reports of those experiencing known symptoms continues to be a critical part of school plans for remaining open this fall. Colleges and universities are creating and using mobile applications that can track users’ symptoms, record COVID-19 test results, get connected to medical resources, and help with contact tracing. Some of these mobile apps built by the university or an AWS Partner use the cloud to securely handle this vital information.

Serverless applications are typically discreet pieces of code that customers can use to manage security-related processes or stitch together multiple AWS services to solve a larger problem. They allow customers to build and run applications and services without dealing with infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning. In this blog, I explain the serverless computing model, the Serverless Application Repository (SAR), solution constructs and implementations, why they matter to our government customers, and how they can use them to solve common problems.

Organizations face a host of threats to business continuity, from extreme weather events to cyber-attacks to human error. Many turn to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to house their workloads in an environment that can withstand disruptions of any type or scale. IT resilience hinges on developing strong architectural, technological, and operational management. Cloud environments require assembly, execution, and maintenance. Here are five best practices for organizations to build IT resilience.

Now more than ever, governments, education institutions, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits globally look to modernize IT to operate more effectively and meet their missions. Cloud technologies are being used to power machine learning and data analytics for quicker insights to advance medicine and science, manage data at scale, and build a resilient workforce and foster a culture of innovation. To help and inspire organizations to use the cloud to accelerate modernization and digital transformation, AWS will hold the AWS Public Sector Summit Online on October 20, 2020.

From speeding the time to science to accelerating the delivery of critical citizen services, our customers are migrating to the AWS Cloud to successfully deliver on their missions. Our current environment has pushed us all into new ways of learning, working, and even socializing. And the cloud has made these recent changes and innovations possible. These customer examples can offer a playbook and inspiration for how organizations can leverage the cloud to innovate quickly and deliver on behalf of citizens.

Quality, inclusive, and relevant education for all helps break the cycle of poverty and reduce inequalities worldwide. As education continues to shift to an online format, the potential for marginalized learners to fall behind is increasing due to the limited number of resources and tools available to help these students succeed. These four AWS EdStart companies from the United States, Brazil, China, and Europe are dedicated to equipping diverse students with tools that can aid them in their educational journey, no matter where they are learning.

This month, many students are heading back to school. And in the US, citizens are starting to head to the polls for a presidential election year. Catch up on what we covered in September on the AWS Fix This podcast.

As schools return for their academic years amid a global pandemic, many questions persist around how best to enable both teachers and students to learn remotely, including accessing materials and applications in a secure and suitable form. Similarly, staff and administrators must have a reliable system for handling confidential information. For some, the answer is found in VPN connectivity and VDI. Streaming applications over the internet instead of having them physically installed on devices and desktops can save costs and address security concerns. InterVision, AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner, helped one of their higher education customers quickly and securely scale remote application delivery to students and faculty using Amazon AppStream 2.0, a solution that provides highly available remote user access while reducing the management time and costs compared to traditional solutions.

T-Digital, a division of Tshwane University Technology Enterprise Holding (TUTEH) in South Africa, built TRes, a digital platform for students living in student housing and for accommodation providers. TRes connects students with available housing and verified and authorized property owners. It addresses student accommodation needs and helps verified and approved property owners fully allocate their residences, while alleviating administrative burden. With help from AWS Professional Services, T-Digital experienced flexibility, agility, and realized cost savings.