AWS Public Sector Blog

Brushed-up coding skills. A first encounter with computer science. A lesson in persistence. This year’s installment of Hour of Code was another success for Computer Science Education Week and Code.org – and for the future of women and underrepresented minorities in technology.

How does a world-class technology university navigate the migration from an on-premises data center to a future-proofed IT infrastructure in the cloud? California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) is one of the top engineering schools in the nation, but the university was struggling with legacy technology that put data at risk.

Combatting modern forms of exploitation demands modern tools. AWS works with several national and international organizations who are committed to protecting human rights. Many nonprofit organizations rely on AWS to help prevent and expose human rights abuses through machine learning, facial and voice recognition, and more, as well as to reduce their overall IT costs so they can focus on mission-critical work.

Fifty-one Las Vegas area students attended re:Invent to learn about cloud computing and how they can get involved with technology beginning with a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) educational path – and ultimately leading to a cloud computing career.

The recent release of the Cloud Management Report 2017 comes as public cloud usage eclipses the $200 billion mark. As consumption grows, more organizations are realizing the need for cooperation across business units to maximize the cloud’s value. This sets up the potential for widespread transformation. It can also introduce some complexity.

Southwest MiTech is an IT support consortium in Michigan under the Kalamazoo Regional Education Service Agency (KRESA) that provides top-to-bottom technology services for KRESA and the districts they serve. Early last year, KRESA was facing tight budgets and increasingly rigorous security and compliance requirements, yet they still were under pressure to scale their infrastructure and provide a disaster recovery (DR) environment.

Hour of Code is now underway. This global movement exposes students to the power of computer science and is held during Computer Science Education Week, which runs this year from December 4-10. We caught up earlier with participating student, Niamani Knight, to discuss her Hour of Code experience. She also shared how she’s building opportunities for other students to learn coding.

We are pleased to announce the expansion of AWS Educate to students ages 14 and older globally*, bringing access to the cloud and its many applications to high school and secondary school students around the world.

We announced AWS CloudStart to support EDOs by providing resources to educate, train, and embrace the cost-effective options that our cloud computing services can offer to companies that are serving customers in the government, education, and nonprofit space.

#GivingTuesday is a day devoted to giving back to the causes that we care about, the issues that define some of us, and the missions that drive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems. This holiday season and beyond, we want to bring awareness to this day and explain how it affects nonprofit organizations that participate.