Category: Public Sector

AWS and the Australian Signals Directorate Essential Eight, Melbourne Business School experiences 99.89% uptime with Amazon WorkSpaces, and five ways new technologies can shape the future of work – all on this month’s top blog roundup.

During my recent visit to Latin America, I was enchanted by the beauty, grace, and passion of tango dance during a show at the Buenos Aires Faena Hotel. The dancers reflect the Argentine people – honoring their history, tradition, and culture, but are not afraid to innovate, take chances, and lead. I was also amazed with the beauty of the Andes, delivering strength, power, a quiet peace and gentle inspiration. It is with this backdrop that I met with AWS customers in Latin America to discuss the power of cloud computing.

This year’s City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge saw a variety of applications from countries around the globe. Nominations included cities, counties, universities, and, for the first time, a diversity category (We Power Tech) using the cloud to improve the lives of their constituents. Learn more about the finalists and their projects, including emergency response and disaster preparedness, collaborative learning, securing elections, and more.

An Amazon Alexa badge with 10-15 hours of dedicated Alexa skills training is now available through AWS Educate. Alexa is Amazon’s voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices like Echo Show and Echo Spot. Alexa provides capabilities, known as “skills,” that enable developers to create a more personalized experience for their products and build natural voice experiences that offer consumers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.

As we continue to see our public sector customers move more mission-critical workloads and applications to the cloud, we seek to further support them, delivering on the tools and services they need to focus on their organization’s goals. To help customers move to the cloud securely and successfully, we have collaborated with SAP National Security Services, Inc. (SAP NS2), an AWS Government Competency Partner with an AWS GovCloud (US) Skill.

On World Environment Day, we are reminded it is up to all of us to better steward the finite resources of our planet. From limiting your utilization of single-use plastics to considering how a move to the cloud could help your organization reduce its overall energy consumption, each action matters. AWS provides infrastructure technology to nonprofits around the world who preserve and protect our environment, enabling not only mission-critical work, but also efficiencies in energy usage.

In June 2017, 56 years after the founding of the organization, the White House Historical Association collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to digitize nearly 20,000 White House photographs, many of which have been in storage for decades and never published until now. The goal was to memorialize their place in history and make educational materials more accessible to the public through the power of the AWS Cloud.

We are excited to announce the lineup of keynote speakers joining us on the main stage for the ninth annual AWS Public Sector Summit June 20-21st at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. These visionaries will share strategies and tactics for shaping culture, building new skillsets, saving costs, and achieving missions.

In keeping with the spirit of Earth and space exploration, here’s another glimpse into the growing dialogue around how the cloud is reshaping planetary science. It’s all ahead of our Earth & Space on AWS Summit Pre-Day experience, which we’re over the moon to present on June 19. (Bear with us, we’re just that excited).

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning are cutting-edge technologies that are changing and enhancing many of our daily tasks from natural language processing and self-driving cars to enhanced data mining and medical informatics. But what do these terms mean, and how can we use these technologies?