AWS Public Sector Blog

Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social enterprise, is aiming to empower individuals and enable more Americans to work, learn, and their full potential. Opportunity@Work has launched TechHire.Careers, a new kind of recruiting platform built specifically to help employers fill entry-level tech positions with talented individuals from diverse backgrounds with the help of AWS Educate.

The AWS Institute teamed up with James Stewart, co-founder of the UK Government Digital Service and Deputy CTO of UK Government, and Manj Kalar, a public finance specialist, to turn this dialogue into actionable ideas. See their four recommendations below on “Budgeting for Change: Four Ways the UK Government Can Spend Smarter and Deliver Better,” which they discussed at the Institute for Government and will discuss next week at the AWS Public Sector Summit.

In May 2015, the CIO’s office at the U.S. Department of Interior embarked on a mission to provide a secure, scalable platform for the 32 agencies that make up the Federal Geographic Data Committee. The platform provides a managed services environment for agencies to host and share geospatial data, geospatial services and geospatial applications for the public, and with other government agencies and their partners. DOI names GTRI, now Zivaro, the mission partner. GTRI, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, specializes in the selection, implementation, deployment, and maintenance of AWS environments.

AWS and the Australian Signals Directorate Essential Eight, Melbourne Business School experiences 99.89% uptime with Amazon WorkSpaces, and five ways new technologies can shape the future of work – all on this month’s top blog roundup.

During my recent visit to Latin America, I was enchanted by the beauty, grace, and passion of tango dance during a show at the Buenos Aires Faena Hotel. The dancers reflect the Argentine people – honoring their history, tradition, and culture, but are not afraid to innovate, take chances, and lead. I was also amazed with the beauty of the Andes, delivering strength, power, a quiet peace and gentle inspiration. It is with this backdrop that I met with AWS customers in Latin America to discuss the power of cloud computing.

This year’s City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge saw a variety of applications from countries around the globe. Nominations included cities, counties, universities, and, for the first time, a diversity category (We Power Tech) using the cloud to improve the lives of their constituents. Learn more about the finalists and their projects, including emergency response and disaster preparedness, collaborative learning, securing elections, and more.

An Amazon Alexa badge with 10-15 hours of dedicated Alexa skills training is now available through AWS Educate. Alexa is Amazon’s voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices like Echo Show and Echo Spot. Alexa provides capabilities, known as “skills,” that enable developers to create a more personalized experience for their products and build natural voice experiences that offer consumers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.

As we continue to see our public sector customers move more mission-critical workloads and applications to the cloud, we seek to further support them, delivering on the tools and services they need to focus on their organization’s goals. To help customers move to the cloud securely and successfully, we have collaborated with SAP National Security Services, Inc. (SAP NS2), an AWS Government Competency Partner with an AWS GovCloud (US) Skill.

On World Environment Day, we are reminded it is up to all of us to better steward the finite resources of our planet. From limiting your utilization of single-use plastics to considering how a move to the cloud could help your organization reduce its overall energy consumption, each action matters. AWS provides infrastructure technology to nonprofits around the world who preserve and protect our environment, enabling not only mission-critical work, but also efficiencies in energy usage.

In June 2017, 56 years after the founding of the organization, the White House Historical Association collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to digitize nearly 20,000 White House photographs, many of which have been in storage for decades and never published until now. The goal was to memorialize their place in history and make educational materials more accessible to the public through the power of the AWS Cloud.