Category: Public Sector

April 1 is Census Day 2020: the day everyone in the United States is counted. Household respondents to the U.S. Census are asked to count every individual living in their household as of Census Day. From representation in Congress to funding for local schools, roads, and emergency services, important decisions are made by the government based on census data, impacting those services for the next decade.

Over 28,000 school age children across the United States competed to name the Mars Rover 2020, but only one student’s name persevered. When the Mars Rover 2020 launches in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, it will be named Perseverance.

AWS is grateful for our AWS Partner Network (APN) Public Sector Partners that have stepped up to support customers during this rapidly changing and dynamic global health situation. I thought I’d share a few examples of how our innovative and agile APN Partners are collaborating with public sector organizations around the world. I hope this list gives you some ideas of ways in which our partner community can support you during this time. Here are just a few examples:

In March, the Fix This podcast focused on how the cloud is used to help improve voter engagement and elections processes and how machine learning helps to power sustainable trucking.

Government customers and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries can now connect their AWS Outposts to the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. With this launch, users in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions can get a consistent AWS experience by accessing the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools across on premises and the cloud.

Moving to remote operations can be difficult in any industry, but especially in education where various stakeholders need to be prepared – from students, teachers, families, and administrators. Moving a highly structured, in-person environment to online is no simple task, so educational leaders across age and learner groups seek out best practices to support remote learning, teaching, and core operations. Here are three examples of how the cloud can help education quickly scale to support disruptions.

Over the past decade, a crop of new companies focused on Earth observation (EO) have made valuable EO data more accessible to a broad audience than before. As a result, we are seeing a dramatic increase in EO science. The value of EO data is the ability to monitor change. Recently, new instrumentation aboard satellites such as radar now allow us to “see” through clouds, allowing observation of any part of the Earth. The reliable, repeatable, and accurate data now flowing from satellites is opening up the reality of operational services powered by satellite imagery. Learn how to get started with EO data using AWS Ground Station.

American University of Bahrain (AUBH) turned to Amazon WorkSpaces for their desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution. Using Amazon WorkSpaces, AUBH runs Windows workloads, such as Windows Office 365 and Windows OneDrive, to create a flexible learning environment for students. Since using Amazon WorkSpaces, AUBH has increased the flexibility in how and where students can learn.

In support of governments and educational institutions around the world, AWS is quickly deploying people and technology to enable remote learning and home working. Our services can help address our customer’s most pressing challenges during this unprecedented time, including making sure citizens are productive with remote working solutions, that students can access online learning platforms, and that communications are reliable and available for public entities at all levels of government.

Are you a U.S. government employee or contractor who is interested in learning about cloud computing? AWS is now offering the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Day and AWS Technical Essentials Day courses virtually to government workers interested in learning about the cloud. These instructor-led courses will be offered online starting Monday, March 23.