Category: Government

When considering digital transformation, governments tend to focus on the potential drawbacks instead of focusing on the risks of failing to adopt new technologies. A newly released report by Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, “The Risk of the Digital Status Quo,” outlines four risks of forgoing digital modernization in Canada and offers strategies to address those risks.

To address technology skill gaps and equip the workforce of the future, Amazon Web Services (AWS) established the eKasi initiative. eKasi helps youths, small businesses and students in South Africa build their technology skills and develop business solutions for the world of tomorrow.

More than 400 regional and local organizations working to address homelessness in the United States are using a new tool by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to better understand and address the homelessness challenge. Those agencies, also known as “Continuums of Care (CoCs),” can use the tool to visualize the situation they are helping address and optimize their responses.

From November 4-8, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will host its first annual “AWS Compliance Week: Achieving Cloud Compliance and Security in the AWS Cloud” to help customers navigate and accelerate their cloud adoption plans for regulated workloads and sensitive data. The five-part, week-long webinar series will highlight how AWS GovCloud (US) Regions are purpose-built to help customers realize cloud benefits when working with Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), defense data, export-controlled data, and criminal justice information (CJI).

Solcast produces real-time, historical and forecast estimates of the available solar radiation resources around the globe. Altogether, this requires processing imagery from five geostationary weather satellites, which take snapshots of the Earth from space every 5-15 minutes. These images can be as fine as 1 kilometer in spatial resolution and are re-captured and transmitted as frequently as every five minutes – a large volume of data. A single third-generation weather satellite in orbit over the United States such as the GOES-16 generates nearly two terabytes (TB) of data each month.

On September 24 & 25, Amazon Web Services (AWS) welcomed 1,865 attendees for the AWS Public Sector Summit in Singapore, newly expanded to include customers from Singapore as well as across the Asia Pacific Region. Technologists and executives gathered to learn how the cloud is driving innovation across government, education, and nonprofits worldwide, get inspired, and begin to build. Read below for highlights from the AWS Public Sector Summit in Singapore.

When Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, struck the Bahamas on September 1, 2019, first responders and aid organizations knew the damage would be significant. Dorian set the record for worst natural disaster to strike the Bahamas and became one of the two most powerful storms to make landfall from the Atlantic Ocean. Organizations standing ready to assist knew they needed innovative solutions to solve some of the more complex problems facing the island’s recovery.

This October 20-23 in Philadelphia, the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC), a public-private partnership of community and government leaders, will host Imagine Nation ELC 2019.
The three-day event brings together more than 1,000 attendees – a third from government, including executives and leaders – to discuss how to improve government through technology. Registration is still open for the event.

IDC, a global market intelligence firm, interviewed Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers running Windows workloads in the AWS Cloud to find out what the benefits were from running Windows on AWS, and the results are telling. IDC’s “The Business Value of Efficiently Running Windows Workloads on AWS” released in July 2019, interviewed AWS customers that averaged 28,579 employees, and represented multiple industries.

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.