AWS Public Sector Blog

When Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, struck the Bahamas on September 1, 2019, first responders and aid organizations knew the damage would be significant. Dorian set the record for worst natural disaster to strike the Bahamas and became one of the two most powerful storms to make landfall from the Atlantic Ocean. Organizations standing ready to assist knew they needed innovative solutions to solve some of the more complex problems facing the island’s recovery.

This October 20-23 in Philadelphia, the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC), a public-private partnership of community and government leaders, will host Imagine Nation ELC 2019.
The three-day event brings together more than 1,000 attendees – a third from government, including executives and leaders – to discuss how to improve government through technology. Registration is still open for the event.

IDC, a global market intelligence firm, interviewed Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers running Windows workloads in the AWS Cloud to find out what the benefits were from running Windows on AWS, and the results are telling. IDC’s “The Business Value of Efficiently Running Windows Workloads on AWS” released in July 2019, interviewed AWS customers that averaged 28,579 employees, and represented multiple industries.

Oxford University Press (OUP) is a department of the University of Oxford and the largest university press in the world. In 2015, OUP launched the Oxford Global Languages (OGL) initiative aiming to build lexical resources for 100 of the world’s languages and make them freely available online. OUP knew that on-premises solutions wouldn’t provide the scalability and flexibility required for developing an MVP and expanding it in case of success. OUP chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it matched the requirements around scalability and flexibility, provided managed services for storing and accessing data securely, and offered options for deployment and automation.

In Paris, 17 young adults – many of whom didn’t have experience in technology until a few months ago – are starting to interview for positions for full-time cloud computing roles with potential employers including D2SI, Capgemini, and Gekko. How is that possible? They just graduated from AWS re/Start, a new digital skills training program in France that aims to support those who are unemployed or underemployed – usually knowing little or nothing about information technology (IT) – to become cloud computing specialists.

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

Public sector organizations are under more pressure than ever to keep data secure, control costs, and empower workers to be more productive. Traditional on-premises tools, such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), application streaming, and mobile access management software, are hard to secure and lack flexibility and scale. As many organizations are looking at cloud-based solutions to meet their needs, it’s important to note that there is more to cloud-based end user computing (EUC) projects than simply moving Microsoft Office products to the cloud. Organizations should take a comprehensive look at their strategic needs and challenges when evaluating cloud-based EUC solutions.

Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) in Virginia has two on-premises data centers. One was built in the 1990s – almost 30 years ago – and the second data center is close to 15 years old. In recent years, LCPS has experienced multiple unit failures, and started to feel the strain of their aging infrastructure.

Education, nonprofit, and government customers often find themselves moving Microsoft workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cost savings, but then also reaped performance improvements. AWS can seamlessly support thousands of applications, systems, and solutions – including Microsoft workloads – without disrupting service during migration. Read stories of how AWS global customers used AWS for Microsoft workloads.

From the latest Amazon EC2 instances to a housing hackathon, check out what you missed last month on the AWS Public Sector blog.