Category: Public Sector

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Seán Lynch, the founder of OpenLitterMap, to share how AWS technologies and open data are helping to solve global challenges like biodiversity loss and plastic pollution with citizen science. Solutions like OpenLitterMap help unlock the potential that a global abundance of technology has for the collection and dissemination of pertinent data that is an instrumental part of positive social change.

Registration is now open for the IMAGINE: Nonprofit conference presented by AWS. On Tuesday, March 14 at the Capital Turnaround in Washington, DC, this no-cost, in-person event brings together the nonprofit community to learn and engage around how innovation in the cloud can drive positive change for people and the planet. With visionary leadership sessions, access to technical experts, networking opportunities, and more, the IMAGINE: Nonprofit conference provides an educational and collaborative experience focused on how to lead in a changing world, future-proof your organization, and scale impact.

Higher education institutions are turning to data to solve challenges, improve efficiency, and create a better student experience. But to obtain the answers institutions need to thrive and better serve students, they often need new technologies. Many universities are upgrading IT systems and investing in state-of-the-art analytics solutions. Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is one such institution that has taken steps to innovate by creating opportunities for evolution with AWS.

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is the number one cause of death for student athletes and the leading cause of death on school campuses. The nonprofit Who We Play For (WWPF) advocates for SCA prevention through advocacy, automated external defibrillator (AED) placement, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training, and heart screenings, which include low-cost electrocardiogram (ECG) screenings from physicians that are experts in pediatric ECG interpretation. To scale their efforts, WWPF collaborated with AWS to build a ML solution to help extend the chance to get screened for SCA to every young person, potentially saving many lives each year.

A new geopolitical and energy market reality has accelerated momentum for the green transition. But there is one geography for which energy is a perennial challenge: islands. Islands have always sought to create a sustainable environment for their populations and have had to use ingenuity, collaboration, and civic will to make it happen—and often by using innovative technology. In this way, islands can be viewed as living laboratories of what could be scaled up for mainland communities. As the world responds to the energy crisis, islands can show a path for overcoming energy challenges.

Many organizations may not fully recognize or calculate the true costs of workload resiliency decisions. These true costs include the full spectrum of costing considerations that make up a decision, from readily-determinable accounting costs to less-recognizable intangible costs. As public sector organizations often have limited resources and complex missions, it’s important to understand the true costs and economic impact involved in a resiliency decision; this can help these organizations to both prepare and plan with their available resources.

Public sector customers face challenges to accomplish complex missions with limited resources. Many IT teams are tasked with implementing centralized network security via third-party firewall appliances; protecting internet access by allowing secure connections to only approved destinations; and scaling security across many AWS accounts and virtual private clouds (VPCs)—all with reduced management and operational complexity. In this blog post, learn two options for how to manage network security with third-party firewall appliances.

AWS announced AWS Modular Data Center. This new service provides U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) customers with the ability to deploy compute and storage capabilities to support large-scale workloads wherever they need it, including in Disconnected, Disrupted, Intermittent, or Limited (DDIL) environments. Instead of relying on limited data center infrastructure or building from the ground up, this offering delivers a cost-effective, self-contained modular data center solution that supports customers’ data center scale workloads.

A key focus for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and state Medicaid agencies is making sure those eligible for Medicaid maintain coverage and supporting transition to alternatives. Medicaid agencies need to conduct outreach to make their millions of members aware of the process for redetermination. With cloud-based tools from AWS, state agencies can conduct this outreach using no code/low code, serverless, elastic services that can scale to two billion text messages a day. In this blog post, learn how to set up a multi-lingual, interactive SMS message campaign that can automatically verify and update member information on file based on member responses.

Many public sector organizations that are moving to the cloud often misunderstand that the architecture of AWS Regions and Availability Zones fundamentally changes how they should think about disaster recovery and resiliency. In this blog post, I share some best practices to answer common questions about building highly available workloads, and share some ways to consider high availability, disaster recovery, and application resiliency within AWS.