Coming soon: The AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Technology Competency

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’re committed to helping first responders, public safety agencies, and emergency and disaster response organizations mitigate the impact to affected communities. We help customers worldwide in the wake of disasters by bringing our operational and logistics expertise as well as cloud technology to support communities when and where they need it most. The AWS Partner Network (APN) also plays a critical role in these efforts, supporting our customers worldwide by building, implementing, and integrating technology to create safer and more resilient communities.

Last year, we launched the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response (PSDR) Competency for Consulting Partners, recognizing top APN Advanced and Premier Consulting Partners with proven public sector success and deep technical proficiency. These partners can help customers leverage AWS cloud technology to prepare for, respond to, and recover from various types of natural or man-made disasters and public safety emergencies globally. This gives customers an easy way to find businesses that offer trusted specialized services tailored to meet their mission-critical needs.

Building on these efforts, today we’re excited to pre-announce the launch of the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Technology Competency. Coming later this year, the expansion will include the addition of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) solutions that deliver APN Partner technology in the areas of emergency management operations, justice and public safety applications, infrastructure resilience and recovery, 911 and emergency communications, and public safety and disaster response data and analytics.

The upcoming launch of the AWS PSDR Technology Competency will further enable our customers to identify the right technology for their mission, making it easy to find AWS-vetted, best-in-class APN Technology Partners with proven public sector customer success and deep technical knowledge.

What partners are doing right now

Today, we are building the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency with our top APN ISVs. These partners provide end-to-end solutions in this space and we validate each for resilience, security, scalability, and more. Three pre-qualified APN Technology Partners—Esri, Juvare, and PowerDMS—help customers address challenges faster and at scale.

Esri, an APN Advanced Technology Partner, has been working with Johns Hopkins University on the COVID-19 Tracking Map. Professor Lauren Gardner, a civil and systems engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, built the dashboard with her graduate student, Ensheng Dong. It is maintained at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, with technical support from Esri and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Esri’s ArcGIS product and the Esri Living Atlas run on AWS, and powers this interactive map experience that globally tracks the known cases, deaths, and recoveries of the COVID-19 virus in near real-time. The map was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds—and it’s free. Esri also has an extensive set of use cases and examples of their solutions for wildfires, hurricane, and earthquakes.

Juvare and their solution for the state of Illinois is another example of work that our APN Technology Partners deliver to customers. At the end of March, the state of Illinois informed Juvare they would be sending out a mobile alert to reach all 12.5 million residents, pointing all medically trained professionals to a landing page where they could volunteer in areas of the state in which they do not live. Quickly, Juvare was able to update the landing site to handle the spike in traffic, using Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB. Starting on March 29, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency issued a series of wireless emergency alert (WEA) alerts directing people to Illinois Helps, resulting in over 120 million page requests over a 48-hour period, including one spike of 50 million across less than five minutes. The alerts ultimately resulted in approximately 30,000 registrations to help fight COVID-19—nearly three times the previous number of properly licensed and credentialed healthcare workers registered in Illinois Helps.

Finally, PowerDMS delivered critical policy and document management software to public safety agencies and first responders across the country during the earlier months of the COVID-19 crisis. When COVID-19 hit, PowerDMS enabled Oregon State Sheriffs Association (OSSA) to centralize, disseminate, and communicate critical incident content. The platform was effectively used as an information repository to communicate with 36 member offices in real-time including training content, jail standards, and other job-critical information. OSSA credits their process and PowerDMS with keeping their personnel free of COVID-19 and ensuring no one contracted COVID-19 while in custody.

How to join the AWS Competency Program

The AWS Competency Program recognizes APN Partners that have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas, industry verticals, or workloads on AWS.

If you are an APN Advanced or Premier Consulting Partner interested in achieving the APN Consulting PSDR Competency, review the Validation Checklist, which provides the criteria necessary to achieve this designation.

If you are an APN Advanced Technology Partner interested in qualifying for the APN Technology PSDR Competency, reach out to us via your partner manager.