Category: Public Sector

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.

A new IDC whitepaper, sponsored by AWS, “How Government Agencies Meet Security and Compliance Requirements in the Cloud” examines why federal agencies are moving more systems and information to the cloud as a launching point for agency-wide IT modernization. The paper shares executive, legislative, and other government-wide initiatives influencing agencies to accelerate their cloud adoption plans, risks IT leaders face by delaying cloud migrations, and how secure, compliant cloud environments help agencies achieve compliance and security for their sensitive workloads.

To help our public sector customers in Sweden accelerate their journey to the cloud, we are launching the AWS ClearStart program. AWS ClearStart helps organizations meet security and regulatory needs through a set of guides, trainings, technology tools, and cloud computing experts to simplify the process of complying with Swedish and EU regulations, including the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (OSL) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as with international information security standards, such as ISO/IEC27001.

People who want to change the world should have the tools and technology to do so. Technology is the most powerful equalizer of our time, providing access to data and knowledge for critical mission delivery. Get inspired and learn more about how the cloud can help you meet your organization’s mission at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) IMAGINE: Nonprofit Online event on Wednesday, October 28, 2020.

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.

Governments at all levels rapidly addressed the rising challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadian governments  met citizens’ needs quickly by building secure, compliant solutions on AWS to deliver critical information and services. Working with partners and AWS, Canadian governments and agencies released multiple solutions for providing a modern, digital-first experience for all to interact with the government and receive the information and services they need.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, an annual campaign to increase awareness of the disease. This year, AWS and its employees are participating in the Tech Day of Pink on October 8, joining the Estée Lauder Companies’ (ELC) annual campaign to raise awareness and donations for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Several nonprofits devoted to the fight against breast cancer use the AWS Cloud to help meet their missions, including Breastcancer.org and Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance (PHDA). Learn more.

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.

Efforts to prevent and combat homelessness are limited by the lack of comprehensive data about people experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for states to identify trends and emerging needs to respond and make data-driven decisions about the effective deployment of resources. The cloud can help bridge information silos. Read on for examples of how states use the cloud to bridge data silos and better serve the homeless.