AWS Public Sector Blog

The Maryland Department of Human Services (DHS) is the state’s primary social service provider. Through 24 local social services agencies, the department assists people in economic need, provides preventive services, and protects vulnerable children and adults in each of Maryland’s 23 counties and the City of Baltimore.

The University of Nottingham has a history dating back to 1881, and while the university is now global with campuses in China and Malaysia, its flagship campus remains in the UK. Today, the university’s research efforts span nearly every discipline. One current project is Crossbow, a new, open source software project conceived and developed by Dr. Christian Suess, a research fellow at The University of Nottingham in conjunction with principal investigator Prof. Charlie Laughton, professor of computational pharmaceutical science. Crossbow is based out of the school of pharmacy at the University of Nottingham, where there is a particular interest in researching the design of new medicines using computer simulations of drugs and proteins.

From new cloud degrees to highlights from the AWS Public Sector Summit, take a look at the top stories from June.

Digital transformation is changing the modus operandi of organizations – both in the public and private sector. This is also the case for Italy, that is still lagging behind more advanced countries. The speed of transformation will also impact Italy’s growth and the international competitiveness of Italian companies. The study by the Institute for Competitiveness analyzes policies that are being implemented to enable Italy to achieve the targets set by the European Digital Agenda and to speed up cloud adoption.

Scientists at NC State University’s North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS) work with large datasets and complex computational analysis. Traditionally, they did their work using on-premises computational resources. As different projects were stretching the limits of those systems, NCICS decided to explore cloud computing. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Jessica Mathews, Jared Rennie, and Tom Maycock to share what they learned from using AWS for climate research. As they considered exploring the cloud to support their work, the idea of leaving the comfort of the local environment was a bit scary. And they had questions: How much will it cost? What does it take to deploy processing to the cloud? Will it be faster? Will the results match what they were getting with their own systems? Here is their story and what they learned.

Countless popular websites maintained by public institutions – including whitehouse.gov and PMIndia.gov – are built on the WordPress platform. It’s essential that these sites are highly scalable. Amazon Lightsail helps ensure that they can handle high-traffic situations. These sites often require on-demand scaling during high-traffic spikes, for example, when media coverage mentions government websites or an educational institution is registering during admissions season. Given these requirements, if the website isn’t set up properly, the features that make WordPress popular for public websites can sometimes become a challenge to manage.

Today, at the AWS São Paulo Summit, we announced that AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator that helps startup EdTech companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available to customers in Brazil. Brazil is the first country in Latin America and second in the Western Hemisphere to offer the AWS EdTech-focused program to customers.

Highline College hosted the 12th annual Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) this spring. The 2019 event was the first regional qualifier for the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This week, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is at the 2019 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISTE supports educators as they rethink the status quo and use technology to drive good practice. At the event, ACT, Frontline Education, and Kahoot! are rolling out Alexa Skills that make it possible for customers to engage with their products through Alexa.

The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is a US-based nonprofit organization funded by NASA, NOAA, and the USGS. ESIP is playing a critical role in facilitating collaborative efforts to improve the collection, stewardship, and use of Earth science data and information. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Dr. Annie Burgess, ESIP Lab Director, to share the story of how ESIP is advancing knowledge of Earth-system science.