AWS Public Sector Blog

With most everyone off campus, parent and student communications are top of mind for school districts and universities. Amazon Alexa can help extend the classroom to home through integrations with commonly used education technology applications. Now Amazon Alexa can aggregate information across education skills into one response, creating a faster, streamlined, more convenient way to access information.

Across recent customer engagements, our teams have seen an increase in requests for support in four key use cases: remote workforce and productivity, citizen engagement, data management and analytics, and operational resilience and business continuity. Today I want to share a few stories of success where customers have implemented AWS services to address these use cases. They address four of the most urgent IT issues facing public sector customers in the crisis.

Getting started with the cloud can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. The first step is understanding the basics. Learn what the cloud is, how it works, and its benefits. Next, learn the different types of cloud computing and the foundational cloud services to help get you started making sense of large amounts of data, innovating quicker, handling sudden changes in demand, and more.

In April 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on AWS launching machine learning enabled search capabilities for COVID-19 dataset, supporting healthcare with technology in response to COVID-19, and building a chatbot for your school in less than an hour. For more blog highlights from this month, you can also check out The Brief, hosted this month by Ray Rogers, the host of the Fix This podcast.

On Military Spouse Appreciation Day, we want to acknowledge the significant contributions, support, and sacrifices of military spouses worldwide. For military spouses, finding employment can be a challenge. To help prepare military spouses for roles in technology, Amazon offers no cost training for US military spouses, transitioning military, and veterans through its AWS Educate initiative.

Since we filed our protest, we’ve been clear in our intent: we don’t think the JEDI award was adjudicated fairly, we think political interference blatantly impacted the award decision, and we’re committed to ensuring the evaluation receives a fair, objective, and impartial review. Recently, Microsoft has published multiple self-righteous and pontificating blog posts that amount to nothing more than misleading noise intended to distract those following the protest. To save you some space (and time), here are the facts.

Until we can meet again, we’ve curated a collection of the top AWS re:Inforce 2019 sessions for security and compliance professionals in the public sector. These sessions answer the compliance questions you were afraid to ask, share ways to harness diversity in your security organization, explore how AWS security services can help encrypt data, manage security alerts, and automate compliance.

Are you a U.S. government employee who is interested in learning about cloud computing? The AWS Training and Certification team is launching an another no-cost virtual series of foundational courses to help you better understand the AWS Cloud, relevant products, common solutions, and architectural best practices for the U.S. Government.

CyberPatient, a Canadian startup, provides an online, digital learning environment to help medical students around the globe practice skills virtually before they ever enter into clinical rotations or step foot into a hospital. In the platform, students can interact with virtual patients and work through scenarios that mimic real life. As more students turn to virtual learning, CyberPatient’s platform is being offered to medical students at no cost.

To help researchers learn about cloud computing, AWS curated a list of no-cost, on-demand online courses tailored to researchers’ needs. With the cloud, scientists can quickly analyze massive data pipelines, store petabytes of data, and share their results with collaborators around the world. These online courses are available at any time to help users learn new cloud skills and services.