AWS Public Sector Blog

From inside the classroom to inside the human brain, the blog stretched to new heights this past month. Check out five of our best posts from the month of May.

Are you stuck in your colocation facility spending precious dollars on maintaining hardware instead of innovating? Well, you are not alone. In the decade plus since Amazon Web Services (AWS) released the first cloud services, organizations around the world are seeing the benefits of letting others run their IT infrastructure so that they can get to business making their apps great. However, when considering a cloud migration, many organizations struggle with how to get started, and often these organizations allow the complexity of a cloud migration to be a barrier to building a migration strategy and roadmap.

June 1st marks the official start of Hurricane Season. This time of year brings strong winds and powerful lessons in preparedness. To support our customers, the AWS Disaster Response Program provides a set of services that enables the disaster response community to easily leverage the benefits of AWS during disasters – whether it is a typhoon, earthquake, or fire. With the AWS Disaster Response Program, governments and nonprofit organizations worldwide can take advantage of technologies and expertise to tap into the on-demand infrastructure of AWS at the edge and in the cloud – for resiliency planning and disaster response – like architecting a business continuity plan built in the cloud to ensure continuity of government, or like spinning up a virtual call center that expands on demand and staffing it with volunteers and deprovisioning the service as soon as demand subsides, or like leveraging Amazon SageMaker to more rapidly analyze geospatial data to assess damage.

How is the current global skills gap impacting governments, educational institutions and nonprofits in the UK? How are UK-based organizations overcoming this skills gap to build a diverse and inclusive workforce? What more can be done?

Many organizations have developed a cloud-migration strategy and are looking at how to accelerate cloud adoption. As organizations increasingly embrace IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS consumption models, many select Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud provider. While pre-application migration planning and application readiness is a key focus area, many organizations realized that network readiness is critical for a successful cloud adoption journey. Legacy network architectures lack the simplicity, adaptability, automation, and application awareness needed to deliver the best user experience. A cloud-ready network should enable secure and optimized connectivity to cloud services from remote locations.

To support our Canadian customers, we continue to grow our presence across Canada from offering new services to hosting events. Recently, we hosted the second annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Ottawa where we shared the latest AWS updates for the public sector in Canada.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover is heading to the red planet. Submit your name by September 30, 2019, and fly along! NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) launched their serverless website on AWS – Send Your Name to Mars. People around the world can now submit their names to be inscribed on the Mars Rover and sent 313 million miles away to Mars in 2020.

Public sector organizations continue to push forward and attempt to do more with less. They must find creative ways to innovate and bring new ideas to their organizations, while also facing challenges such as increasing cyber threats and maintaining mission-critical legacy systems. One way public sector customers bring innovation into their organization is with a hybrid cloud strategy.

Today, on Red Nose Day, we are shining a light on the annual campaign to end child hunger. In the US alone, there are approximately 15.5 million impoverished children. Studies show that suffering from food insecurity can have lifelong effects on children, contributing to physical and mental health problems and lower academic performance. To address this issue, nonprofits are discovering that technology is a powerful resource to use on behalf of the populations they serve. Learn how one campaign – No Kid Hungry – is using data and technology to help end childhood hunger:

Listen closely… can you hear the rainforest? Rainforest Connection is a 501c3 that creates technology to empower protectors of the rainforest who wish to end illegal deforestation in real-time. But, when a tree falls in the forest, how many people are around to hear it? A quick look at the facts shows why this issue is relevant to anyone reading this post.