Category: Education

With a growing focus on cybersecurity and available grant funding, many states are planning to protect state agencies, cities, counties, and schools. At the state and federal levels, programs are funded to support these efforts. State and local government (SLG) agencies now have procurement questions to ask and decisions to make to maximize governance and security, simplify vendor management, and accelerate the overall process within a heavily regulated procurement environment. Learn three important considerations for public sector procurement of cybersecurity solutions, as well as best practices from AWS for leveraging these new cybersecurity programs.

Many organizations within state and local government (SLG) and education must build digital environments and services that meet a variety of dynamic security and compliance considerations, such as StateRAMP and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Learn key top-level best practices from AWS for how to use AWS Security Services to meet the unique needs of education and SLG organizations.

Waterford.org is an early education nonprofit committed to advancing equity and excellence for young learners. Waterford.org provides personalized programs for learners from pre-kindergarten to second grade, and support services for families and educators so the adults in a child’s life can help them reach their full potential. To deliver these educational resources to families and children, Waterford.org uses AWS.

Moving a college’s or university’s on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud involves a lot of change in organization, culture, and practice. However, in my experience as a former chief financial officer (CFO) in higher education, financial planning for cloud computing is often not attended to with as much diligence. Financial planning needs to be understood as a positive feature of digital transformation, even if it means changing how financial plans are developed and managed. In this blog post, learn four strategies to consider when deciding to migrate to the cloud.

The Think Big for Small Business (TBSB) program provides AWS Partners with access to AWS Partner Programs, financial incentives, and additional visibility with customers and AWS teams. Since March 2021, more than 500 partners from 41 countries have participated in the TBSB program, and have launched more than 1,200 opportunities with public sector customers. Learn how four TBSB partners supported public sector customers through their digital transformation in the TBSB program.

Data spaces can help break down these silos between industries and sectors. Data spaces facilitate a decentralized and secure data exchange across organizations and industries that come together to pool, access, process, and share data. They enable simple, secure, open standards-based, and interoperable data-sharing, while allowing for organizations to maintain full control over their data. Learn how data spaces support simple and secure data-sharing between organizations and sectors, current data space initiatives in Europe and beyond, and how to leverage a data space with AWS.

AWS announced the release of the Operational Readiness Review (ORR) program as a custom lens for the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which is designed to help you review the state of your applications and workloads against architectural best practices, identify opportunities for improvement, and track progress over time. Creating a custom lens for the Well-Architected Tool with the ORR program can help supplement Well-Architected reviews by including lessons learned that are specific to your business, culture, tools, and governance rules. Learn how to set up the ORR as a custom lens in this walkthrough.

Many organizations invest in infrastructure for future needs but may overlook needed technical training and cloud modernization skills for people within the organization. The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance outlined in six different perspectives for an organization’s cloud transformation journey. One of these perspectives, People perspective: culture and change, addresses how to develop capabilities for the growth of people within an organization. Learn how developing key capabilities within the People perspective of the AWS CAF can support long-term mission success.

At AWS, we work with K12 schools, higher education institutions, and education technology (EdTech) and learning companies to support teaching and learning, research innovation, and to build lasting institutions that positively impact their communities. We asked our higher education customers what’s top of mind for them in 2023, capturing insights from AWS education subject matter experts and global education experts. Learn the main priorities that they shared with us, and what their future roadmap is for teaching, learning, and research.

In 2022, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon, part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO. Participants were asked to use their creativity, intelligence, and technical skills to build sustainability solutions using data from ASDI on any AWS Cloud services to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN). We connected with Jeff McWhirter, the first place winner, to learn more about his winning project, the Repository for Archiving and MAnaging Diverse Data (RAMADDA).