AWS Public Sector Blog

This quarter, AWS released 36 new or updated datasets. As July 16 is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Appreciation Day, the AWS Open Data team is highlighting three unique datasets that are analysis-ready for AI. What will you build with these datasets?

AWS announced the winners of the inaugural State and Local Government (SLG) Champions Awards at the AWS Imagine Conference in Sacramento, California. The SLG Champions join the AWS Education Champions community, which was launched last year. The Champions program celebrates public sector agencies whose work empowers innovation and transformation in education and government using the AWS Cloud.

To celebrate the leaders and organizations that are propelling the academic landscape forward, AWS announced the 2023 cohort of Education Champions at IMAGINE: Education, State and Local Leaders 2023 Conference. The 2023 AWS Education Champions are pioneers that demonstrate meaningful digital transformation at their education institution to improve student outcomes, build institutional resiliency, accelerate research that can lead to life-changing discoveries, and more – all using the AWS Cloud.

Without a safe place to sleep at night, it’s hard to focus on employment, staying healthy, raising a family — the building blocks of a good life. In communities across the country, organizations, philanthropists, and government are working hard to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring. In many cases, they’re using AWS to coordinate their response.

AWS announced the 13 startups selected to participate in the AWS European Defence Accelerator. The startups offer solutions to help the European Defence industry enhance its energy resilience, secure information sharing, sensing and decision making, quantum, and cyber resilience for mission-critical needs for land, air, maritime, space, and cyber domains. Applications were invited from startups around the globe who are interested in doing business with defence and national security organizations across Europe.

As student enrollment begins to stabilize at colleges and universities, higher education leaders are focused on supporting equitable access to postsecondary education. Many leaders are turning to technology to address systemic barriers to education by making services more transparent, efficient, and simple for learners and staff. Together with AWS, Highline College’s financial aid department created a key tool that helped eliminate one such barrier.

In 2022, Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) launched their journey to future-proofing with the cloud. Modernizing the university’s technology was a top priority to help improve the security of the university, improve business continuity, and solve the unique challenges of the university’s location. Working together with AWS and AWS Partners Strata Information Group and VMware, XULA migrated over 90 percent of its critical systems to the cloud, boosted its cybersecurity posture, and reduced IT costs.

AWS announced the availability of Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) for Education, an industry-specific deployment of the LZA on AWS, designed to further support education customers in designing cloud environments for their compliance needs. The LZA on AWS solution is architected to align with AWS best practices and multiple, global compliance frameworks. The new LZA for Education builds on the LZA to help customers secure their research workloads or workloads containing student data by giving them a set of default configurations that they can use as a starting point and iterate on to define security and compliance posture as code.

States are reevaluating the resiliency, security, and adaptability of their unemployment insurance (UI) systems. The AWS whitepaper, Why Unemployment Insurance Systems Belong in the Cloud, explores lessons learned from the pandemic – and provides opportunities for a path forward. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to modernization, we propose five tenets to anchor a vision of modern UI benefits systems and explore the different technical approaches to realize that vision.

Community Solutions is a US-based nonprofit working to end homelessness through its Built for Zero program, a movement uniting with cities across the US to bridge strategy and support to reduce homelessness. The AWS Fix This podcast sat down with the Community Solutions team to see how it uses AWS to unlock data to measure and monitor its progress. Plus, representatives from the nonprofit Coming Home of Middlesex County, based in New Jersey, joined to discuss how Middlesex County and Community Solutions are working together to create a future where no one is left behind.