Category: Public Sector

Higher education institutions that hadn’t previously considered the cloud prior to the pandemic are now investigating how to begin their cloud journey. In this blog post, we highlight some strategies and first projects to help higher education institutions get started with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud simply and efficiently. 

To solve some of the most pressing water and energy challenges, scientists and engineers need access to robust, reliable data that is often sensitive and protected. Data providers, researchers, and host institutions need to adhere to strict requirements for protecting and securing this data. The Center for Water-Energy Efficiency (CWEE) at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) used AWS to create a centralized, secure data repository that streamlines data sharing.

Goodnet is an organization with a mission to share the good things happening globally. AWS allows Goodnet to disseminate video and written content to audiences all over the world to help spread positivity. Specifically, Amazon CloudFront supports the delivery of their online articles, newsletters, and videos to distribute content to their large community of viewers and readers quickly and safely, no matter where they are in the world. Learn more about Goodnet in this guest post from their team.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), the US has a shortage of 6.8 million rental homes for low-income renters. Many communities have implemented rent registration and assistance programs to preserve affordability and prevent displacement. Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and partners are leveraging the cloud to monitor the availability of rental units in real time to support their work.

The Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN) uses email as their main communication method, with over 800 email accounts using up to 50GB of storage space each. IHVN used AWS to migrate their email to Amazon WorkMail to reduce the cost of each mailbox by 64 percent, allowing their IT team to easily manage the corporate email infrastructure and get enterprise grade security.

At the AWS Summit Online – Americas fireside chat hosted by Max Peterson, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector, three public sector leaders discussed recovery and digital transformation across education and healthcare in the Americas following the COVID-19 pandemic. The fireside chat panelists experienced firsthand the need to scale rapidly due to the pandemic and their stories illustrate the transformational power of the cloud to drive impact in the public sector.

Government agencies are moving to speed up service delivery, but agencies need to obtain an Authority to Operate (ATO) that demonstrates security compliance prior to implementation, which can take a significant amount of time and can prove to be a challenge in meeting tight deadlines. AWS Partner Booz Allen Hamilton (Booz Allen) uses a platform as a service model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable their customers to rapidly build, test, scan, and deploy their applications — accelerating releases in the federal government from months to days.

Nonprofit need solutions that help them spend less money and time on IT infrastructure and allow them to further core goals. AWS Lambda can help. Learn how AWS Lambda can reduce IT management burden and how to create an example AWS Lambda function that streamlines how nonprofits cut down their AWS spend.

Weather radars see more than just the weather: they see smoke from fires, meteors, birds, mayflies, and almost anything else in the atmosphere. This makes weather radars an invaluable tool for scientists seeking to further the understanding of atmospheric processes and anything else that happens to be flying through the radar’s field of view. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability-related innovation and research by helping to minimizing the cost and time required to store, acquire, and analyze large weather and climate datasets.

Governments have similar problems and are not in competition, so using technology that others have developed and made freely available via open source to transform essential services makes sense. To make open source solutions easier to find for governments, AWS recently created an online repository: Open Government Solutions.