AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

Compliance with the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy is an ongoing task that includes data center infrastructure development and maintenance, creation of new cloud products and features, and performance of background checks on covered employees. In order to serve the Justice and Public Safety community’s most sensitive CJIS workloads in the cloud, AWS […]

With the availability of Wi-Fi and Chromebooks in the classroom, students are better positioned than ever before to take advantage of digital learning tools. However, Chromebooks don’t easily support demanding software, such as CAD/CAM and other tools needed for Science Technology Education and Math (STEM) classes. So while a classroom may have ubiquitous access to the internet, teachers who require more robust desktop applications and software still find themselves reserving time in school computer labs.

The cloud enables organizations to achieve their missions faster, speed up innovation, and save costs by scaling up quickly without the lengthy and costly process of acquiring additional hardware. Although more public sector organizations are adopting the cloud for mission-critical workloads, misconceptions about vendor lock-in still exist.

Education users take advantage of VMware-based cloud services for the rapid delivery of cloud benefits to traditional applications and VMware-based environments. A VMware hybrid-cloud solution offers a compatible, interoperable environment with full workload portability so that you can rapidly move to a public cloud service without making any changes to your applications. This is ideal for disaster recovery, dev/test environments, data center consolidation, rapid project delivery, or simply getting out of the data center business.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides patient care and federal benefits to Veterans and their dependents. The organization is split up into silos of health, benefit, and cemetery benefits; VA’s web presence was similarly fractured and users had difficulty interacting with VA online. The U.S. Digital Service team at VA looked across VA’s many products from the point of view of the Veteran. What do they want to do? How do they want to interact with VA? They started as a small team, iteratively building out features on Vets.gov.

U.S. federal customers move workloads of all sizes to the AWS Cloud. These projects range from single deliverables to complete data center migrations, frequently implemented across multiple AWS accounts for cost-containment and security purposes. Regardless of size though, our customers face common governance challenges.

Cloud technology is helping to modernize IT in support of good government. By moving to the consumption-based model of the cloud, government agencies can save money, innovate faster, and deliver capabilities that help achieve their mission.

Pairing Amazon EC2 instances with a Windows Server provides a secure and reliable environment to quickly deploy and run Microsoft Exchange Server. Many of our customers have opted for this architecture, which is compatible with several versions of Exchange Server, including 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

The United Nations (UN) has named 17 goals that will help boost sustainable development worldwide. Technology and cloud-based solutions will be a critical part of achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs). DigitalGlobe, one of the world’s leading providers of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and analysis, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), has launched the GBDX for Sustainability Challenge. We are looking for passionate participants who can leverage machine learning and high-resolution satellite imagery for geospatial solutions that support these sustainable development goals, such as disaster response, food security, poverty elimination, and ending malaria, to name a few.

We strive to meet our customers not only where they are now, but also where they want to be in the future. This requires constant innovation and rapid development of public sector solutions each year. In 2017, this took the form of the AWS Secret Region, achieving DoD Impact Level 5, and making AWS Educate available to students ages 14 and older – just to name a few highlights.