AWS Public Sector Blog

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.

We are excited to announce the lineup of keynote speakers joining us on the main stage for the ninth annual AWS Public Sector Summit June 20-21st at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. These visionaries will share strategies and tactics for shaping culture, building new skillsets, saving costs, and achieving missions.

In keeping with the spirit of Earth and space exploration, here’s another glimpse into the growing dialogue around how the cloud is reshaping planetary science. It’s all ahead of our Earth & Space on AWS Summit Pre-Day experience, which we’re over the moon to present on June 19. (Bear with us, we’re just that excited).

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning are cutting-edge technologies that are changing and enhancing many of our daily tasks from natural language processing and self-driving cars to enhanced data mining and medical informatics. But what do these terms mean, and how can we use these technologies?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has multiple Identity partitions: AWS, AWS GovCloud (US), and AWS China. You can see these represented in their ARNs (arn:aws, arn:aws-us-gov, arn:aws-cn). For security, services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) do not have access to credentials beyond their boundaries, which can make it difficult to transfer information from inside one Identity boundary to another. There is a new tool though, that reduces time and complexity for customers migrating their workloads into AWS GovCloud (US) – gov-cloud-import.

Looking ahead to the future of federal cloud adoption and the steps government has already taken, John Hale, Chief of Cloud Services at Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), joined Doug VanDyke, Director of Federal Civilian and Nonprofits at Amazon Web Services (AWS), for a fireside chat at FCW’s recent Cloud Summit. They discussed how agencies have approached their cloud migrations and have taken advantage of the benefits the cloud brings.

In 2003, the Singapore campus opened with around 300 students, two support staff, and basic IT infrastructure. Fast forward to 2018, and the university now serves more than 3,000 students. With the growth of the university, they realized that what worked for them in the past would not take them where they needed to be in the future. To remain competitive and keep up with the needs of students, faculty, and staff, JCU looked to transform the university’s IT to leverage emerging educational technology. They turned to the AWS Cloud for accessibility, agility, global reach, reliability, and cost savings as they personalized their own digital transformation.

Join us for a unique Earth & Space on AWS experience Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Hear from customers and thought leaders who are unearthing new discoveries through cloud technology and public-private partnerships. Choose from nine breakout sessions highlighting innovations with geospatial data, satellite technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-performance computing, and much more.

While the fires spread in Sonoma County in October 2017, the focus was on fighting the flames that burned more than 110,000 acres and on helping the citizens displaced from their homes get access to emergency response resources. In addition to shelter, food, and water, time was another important resource. Citizens have high expectations for government services, whether at the state or municipal level, especially in the aftermath of a disaster. Immediately following the Sonoma County fires, the staffing resources in place could not handle the demands required to provide services and educate the public on what resources were available. To scale to meet the demands of citizens, QLess, an innovator in customer-interaction management (CIM) technology, worked around the clock to deploy its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted solution for Sonoma County in a single weekend.