AWS Public Sector Blog

In 2020, the City of Fort St. John in British Columbia began searching for innovative solutions to make life more simple for its young population. City staff wanted to better serve residents in ways that would suit their busy, digitally connected lifestyles. So the city worked with Cocoflo, a smart cities technology company, to implement a digital solution that could make municipal information and services more accessible through their SmartLiving portal—powered by AWS.

Are you one of the many students that spent all year dreaming of summer vacation? Summer is here, but if you’re a motivated go-getter, you may find yourself ready for a challenge or to learn something new. AWS Educate helps you build your cloud skills at your own pace, on your own time—no matter where you are on your journey in learning about the cloud.

Forrester estimates that data-driven businesses are growing at an average of more than 30 percent annually. This is also happening at education technology companies. With new data sources have emerging, including real-time streaming data from virtual classrooms, mobile engagement, unique usage, and new learners, these data sources are shaping the next generation of EdTech products that engage learners meaningfully around the world. Learn how four AWS EdStart Members are utilizing data to power their solutions.

In 2021, AWS announced global support for Girls in Tech, a nonprofit founded in 2007 dedicated to eliminating the gender gap in tech. Last week, AWS and Girls In Tech hosted an Evening with Experts event at Amazon HQ2 in Arlington, VA. The in-person event provided an opportunity for women in the local area to hear from public sector and public service technology experts on professional growth opportunities and partnerships to reshape the industry to be more equitable and efficient.

Higher education faces a complex set of challenges as it emerges from the pandemic years. Leaders find they must think differently about supporting students through their educational journeys, personalizing the learning experience, offering more flexibility in learning modality, and better supporting students, including attending to mental health. At the core of this transformation is data. Learn more about the higher education journey to effectively utilizing data, then learn how to build a cloud data strategy in the eBook The Data-Informed Institution.

Edge computing moves data processing and analysis close to endpoints where data is generated to deliver real-time responsiveness, and reduces cost associated with transferring large amounts of data. Edge environments include Internet of Things (IoT) or mobile devices, sensors, video cameras, and other connected resources. With edge, the usual security principles still apply such as protecting data at rest and in motion, but new considerations emerge. Learn more in the new IDC whitepaper.

Security is priority number one at AWS. Data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is private by default. However, some datasets are made to be shared. In this blog post, we cover the no-cost mechanisms data providers can utilize to create access control policies for their highly distributed open datasets.

Today, at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Toronto Summit 2022, we announced that AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available to customers in Canada.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are critical tools being used in healthcare research, autonomous applications, predictive maintenance, and also a key tool used to advance sustainability solutions. However, to use AI and ML to solve sustainability problems, innovators need specific datasets that are prepared for analysis and training of the models. To help create and accelerate sustainability solutions, the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) today announced easier identification of sustainability datasets with integration in AWS Data Exchange and the launch of a sustainability hackathon.

Customer experience (CX) has emerged as a key priority in the US following the 2021 Biden Administration Executive Order (EO) to transform federal customer experience and service delivery. Application modernization enables agencies to simplify business processes and provide customers with flexible, interactive, and simple to use applications, resulting in improved CX. In this blog post, we present an AWS architecture framework that agencies can use to develop and deploy a modern application that helps improve CX.