AWS Public Sector Blog

The Urban Analytics Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) spearheads research in geospatial data analysis and 3D city modelling. The lab’s work underpins the development of smart cities and provides scientists, architects, urban planners, and real estate developers with data insights. These insights help parties make informed decisions about projects ranging from energy modelling to urban farming. To meet rising global demand for its data analytics and planning tools, Urban Analytics Lab turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Data has become a strategic asset. With the right tools, data becomes predictive and makes us agile. Using data-led migrations and advanced data analytics solutions, AWS Partners create repeatable and scalable solutions that provide increased operational efficiencies and profitability for companies, agencies, and governments. The three steps to gaining the full value of data are: migrate data to the cloud data lake, set up an analytics engine, and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including ML and deep learning.

According to FAIR Health and the American Medical Association, telehealth use saw a nearly 3000% growth from pre-pandemic to during the pandemic. These services make virtual, real-time interactions between patient and provider possible. However, the great promise of telehealth has highlighted existing roadblocks that some face when trying to access healthcare in this country. The National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization on a mission to provide equitable access to health technologies and to make sure that these technologies address the needs of underserved communities and communities of color. Since its founding in 2008, NHIT has worked to advance health equity and economic viability on issues such as broadband access, electronic health records, precision medicine, consumer health applications and disaster resiliency.

Nonprofits and education institutions of all sizes rely on large amounts of data to serve their stakeholders, programs, and governance. For many organizations, the first step in a technology transformation begins with centralizing data that is siloed across a variety of mission critical systems. In support of these goals, Salesforce.org and Amazon Web Service (AWS) are working together to help nonprofits and education institutions derive actionable insights from their data.

With more than 1,400 different systems that healthcare providers use to run their scheduling, and millions of Chicago residents seeking a vaccine, a unified, citywide rollout for COVID-19 vaccinations is a challenge. Like many municipalities, early in the pandemic, the city of Chicago preferred to offer its residents a centralized find-and-book appointment system for COVID-19 testing, but other priorities and operational challenges prevented this. However, for vaccines, the team leading the city’s COVID-19 vaccination response was determined to deliver a more seamless experience for residents. The city used the Zocdoc Vaccine Scheduler built on AWS.

AWS Training and Certification is now offering a new foundational training course on AWS GovCloud (US) as part of their no-cost training webinar series. Introduction to Governance and Compliance in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions is a training workshop for those looking for a solution to host sensitive data and regulated workloads, or IT professionals just looking to learn more about AWS GovCloud (US). This new live training webinar dives into the basics of how AWS and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions address these stringent security, compliance, and governance requirements.

To help protect investments on ML, government organizations can securely store ML source code. Storing Amazon SageMaker Studio code in an AWS CodeCommit repository enables you to keep them as standalone documents to reuse in the future. SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare data and build, train, and deploy models. Read on to learn the steps to configure a git-based repository on CodeCommit to manage ML code developed with SageMaker.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We work with data providers to democratize access to data by making it available for analysis on AWS; develop new cloud-native techniques, formats, and tools that lower the cost of working with data; and encourage the development of communities that benefit from access to shared datasets. Our full list of publicly available datasets are on the Registry of Open Data on AWS. This quarter, we released 28 new datasets including data on SARS-CoV-2 viral genomes, storm surge forecasts, and US census data. Check out some highlights.

Organizations across the public sector are leveraging the cloud to drive their missions forward with cutting-edge innovation. At the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Summit Online, vice president of worldwide public sector and industries Teresa Carlson and vice president of worldwide public sector Max Peterson at AWS shared the latest updates and spoke with leaders who are reinventing what’s possible using the AWS Cloud. Here’s what you missed.

The future of tech is diverse, and AWS Training and Certification is building an inclusive and diverse workforce for the future through accessible cloud education programs for anyone with the desire to learn. We believe when you remove barriers to education, you bring new learners to the cloud and open doors to jobs and long-term careers that people may have thought were out of reach or, in some cases, didn’t even know existed. Public sector organizations are vying for top cloud skilled professionals and have much to gain when we increase the pool of available cloud talent.