AWS Public Sector Blog

In September, we honored National Campus Safety Awareness Month and payed extra mind to the importance of keeping students and teachers safe. But, the focus on this important topic is critical year-round.

CrisisGo, an AWS Technology Partner, is dedicated to creating safe classrooms and empowering people to take an active role in keeping themselves and others safe. Its mobile platform is designed to enhance school safety through alerting, communication, and incident-management features, equipping anyone with access to a computer or phone with emergency tools and resources. The team has been particularly focused on protecting both mental and physical health at schools and universities.

Cromwell is a workflow management system from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research institute that leverages the power of genomics to help us understand biology as well as treat human disease. Cromwell aims to facilitate scientific workflows for genome analysis. It enables genomic researchers, scientists, developers, and analysts to efficiently run their experiments, without deep expertise in computing capabilities. And it’s now on AWS.

Over the years, I have talked to thousands of customers about security and compliance topics. Many of these conversations revolved around specific security controls customers were interested in, or assurances about how specific cloud services are managed, or whether a cloud service complies with a specific regulation. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) tend to be focused on maximizing control and visibility – and for good reasons. But with the focus on security controls and compliance requirements, one important topic rarely gets discussed: innovation. Overlooking the value of innovation to an organization, and the value of the pace of innovation, can be a serious ROI miscalculation.

The Bahrain government has set a goal to shift the IT infrastructures of all its ministries and offices to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As Bahrain embraces the cloud, AWS is committed to fostering a spirit of innovation in the Middle East. Ahead of the upcoming AWS Summit in Bahrain where we will offer the inspiration and technical knowledge you need to get more from the cloud, we are highlighting how Almoayyed Computers helped the Bahrain Ministry of Information Affairs (MIA) move a mission-critical, customer-facing website onto AWS in less than two weeks with no downtime.

Reanalysis is the term for using modern-day technology to analyze weather data from the past. By doing so, meteorologists and climatologists can produce a more accurate analysis of previous weather conditions, which is important for climate change research. The European Centre of Medium Range Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing its latest reanalysis dataset, called ERA5. Recently, Chris Kalima and his team at Intertrust, in conjunction with the AWS Public Datasets Program, have been working to bring the ERA5 data to AWS.

Adoption of cloud computing is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage. Our nation’s warfighters deserve the most innovative and secure solutions. The AWS Snowball Edge is designed for rugged deployments in unfriendly physical environments. For the military, that may mean using the cloud in the middle of the desert, on board ships, and on the front line of the battlefield.

Choice and self-determination are cornerstones of our nation’s democratic process. Come election night, we might not all root for the same candidates, but there’s one point we can all rally around – the need for modernization and the role of the cloud in powering U.S. elections.

Last week, we hosted our fifth annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia. More than 1,100 government, education, and nonprofit attendees from across the region attended the Summit, which featured 35 breakout sessions within seven tracks.
In this blog post, we recap the major themes coming from the event.

The U.S. Air Force migrated the Air Force Portal, which posts officer promotional lists and other information, to the cloud. With a pay-as-you-go model, the Air Force only has to pay if the portal is being used, instead of a flat fee upfront. This model leads to savings when traffic is down. Migrating applications to a commercial cloud eliminates the need for the government to manage and sustain enough servers in times of maximum traffic such as staff sergeant promotion release days.

The U.S. federal government has been migrating to the cloud for a long time. See the full timeline here. Their cloud journey began with email services and websites, and now virtually any type of workload is running in the AWS Cloud. From websites to mission-critical apps, the cloud is helping government agencies accomplish things they never thought possible.