AWS Public Sector Blog

The AWS Public Sector Blog has ramped up full-speed for 2019, bringing you stories of cloud transformations, security updates, scientific breakthroughs, and more. Check out the top five posts that had our readers talking in January.

Although more customers every day are using AWS to build, run and gain insights from data lakes, the journey to a data lake for many organizations can be one of uncertainty, and a path that may even seem too difficult to attempt. In this blog, we will discuss the challenges organizations can face with siloed data and how data from disparate systems can be brought together using data domains.

The use of robot mannequins to simulate human behavior has become an integral part of nursing education. As these simulations become more realistic, technicians and educators are challenged with creating environments that support student and nurse decision-making capacities in mid- to high-fidelity scenarios.

On January 22, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted Emergency Directive 19-01, “Mitigate DNS Infrastructure Tampering.” The directive states that the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is aware of multiple executive branch agency domains that were impacted by a DNS tampering campaign. The directive requires that by February 5th agencies must take four specific actions. For each action, we suggest guidance below for AWS customers.

AWS CloudFormation templates are now available for nonprofit organizations to deploy a production-ready REDCap environment in 20 minutes, increasing researchers’ agility and reducing the cost of electronically capturing research survey information. This automation deploys the latest REDCap software on secure, highly available AWS infrastructure and includes the ability to utilize the REDCap “Easy Upgrade” feature. With this automation and architecture, researchers can deploy and manage REDCap with a click of a button, without the need for specialized IT skills

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has awarded PROTECTED certification to AWS. This is currently the highest data security certification available in Australia for cloud providers on the Certified Cloud Services List (CCSL). With this new certification, public sector organisations can easily store their most highly sensitive workloads in the AWS Cloud.

It’s no surprise that organizations are worried about becoming locked in to their cloud provider. After all, the history of IT is full of examples of vendors taking advantage of high switching costs to impose restrictive licensing terms and to increase prices. But the cloud is different—and in fact, is making it harder and harder for software, hardware, and IT service vendors to take advantage of the leverage that they have had in the past.

Are you a U.S. federal government employee or contractor who is interested in learning about cloud computing during the government shutdown? We are offering the popular AWS Technical Essentials Day virtually to government workers interested in learning about the cloud. This instructor-led course will be offered online on January 24th and 31st.

The City of Baltimore is collaborating with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudStart program to develop solutions to serve the city and citizens of Baltimore. AWS CloudStart supports Economic Development Organizations (EDOs) by providing resources to educate, train, and embrace the cost-effective options that AWS cloud computing services can offer to organizations that are serving customers in the government, education, and nonprofit space.

Many west coast Canadian customers, such as Vancouver International Airport and BC Hydro, are using the AWS Cloud to save money and better serve citizens. But it doesn’t stop there. Hear firsthand from some of our Canadian customers about their cloud journey. Here’s what they had to say on some key topics – transformation, security, and customer centricity.