AWS Public Sector Blog

From September 12-15, AWS will hold AWS Federal Learning Days at our HQ2 location in Arlington, VA. Built for a range of federal customers, from mission owners to cloud technical experts to IT managers, AWS Federal Learning days can help you improve your cloud knowledge and learn new ways to achieve your mission outcomes. Whether you’re a cloud expert or just beginning your journey, the daily AWS training sessions at the AWS Federal Learning Days will cover a range of technical and mission-oriented topics to help hone your skills.

To help our Australian customers, AWS provides pre-built conformance packs for the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Essential Eight Maturity Model and the ACSC Information Security Manual (ISM). The ACSC’s Essential Eight was first published in 2017 and is a set of prioritised security mitigation strategies designed to help protect organisations against various security threats. In this blog post, I walk you through how to set up a conformance pack in AWS Config that is designed to help you implement and track the ASCS Essential Eight model.

Dive into conversations on the AWS Fix This podcast to learn how three AWS IMAGINE Grant winners are using the cloud to make impactful contributions to the planet through building community connections, preserving history, and saving lives.

At the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center (BCM HGSC), we aim to advance precision medicine and research in genomics. In that effort, we joined the ambitious All of Us Research Program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help deliver genomic data to over one million individuals across the United States. In early 2019, we estimated that processing whole genome samples for this megaproject would imply a scale-up of over four times the production workload of our center. We used AWS to support our new pipeline demands, which saved time, reduced costs, and created new opportunities for future development.

Carbyne, an AWS justice and public safety customer and partner, provides 911 call handling systems, offering a cloud-native software as a service (SaaS) platform. Although any public safety answering points (PSAPs) can benefit from Carbyne’s cloud-powered solution, certain regions with hostile, remote terrain can especially benefit from improved caller location and the ability to put eyes on the scene. This is crucial, for example, in situations where people are lost or hurt in the desert, and in desert-heavy counties that form the Rio Grande Council of Governments (RGCOG). Using Carbyne improved RioCOG’s caller location from an accuracy of a few miles to within roughly 10 meters on over 85% of emergency calls.

In July 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released a cloud native access point (CNAP) reference design that follows zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles and provides a new approach to access mission owner (MO) applications. The DoD’s reference design discusses four core capabilities of CNAP: authenticated and authorized entities (C1), authorized ingress (C2), authorized egress (C3), and security monitoring and compliance enforcement (C4). In this blog post, we walk through how to establish the C2 component via a virtual internet access point (vIAP) with AWS. The proposed architectures can reduce operational cost and management overhead, while improving the accessibility, resiliency, and security of mission owner applications.

The Port of Long Beach, California is the second busiest port in the United States and needs to effectively process and oversee more than $200 billion worth of cargo each year. In addition to keeping track of items and effectively communicating with stakeholders, the Port in recent times has had to contend with shipping delays and other supply change issues exacerbated by the pandemic. To increase visibility and efficiency of cargo movement, the Port turned to AWS to pioneer an innovative solution in the cloud.

Data lakes are becoming increasingly common in many different workloads, and geospatial is no exception. In 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced geography and geohash support on Amazon Redshift, so geospatial analysts have the capability to quickly and efficiently query geohashed vector data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). In this blog post, I walk through how to use geohashing with Amazon Redshift partitioning for quick and efficient geospatial data access, analysis, and transformation in your data lake.

The IMAGINE 2022 conference presented by AWS is fast approaching, but there’s still time to register your spot. On Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, the IMAGINE 2022 conference will bring together education, state, and local leaders for a full day of learning about the latest innovations and best practices in the cloud to help transform communities. Join other mission-driven leaders for a full day of learning at this in-person event that combines thought leadership sessions, fireside chats, and networking opportunities designed to leave you with inspiration, new connections, and tangible ideas to take back to your organization or institution.

The browser-based computational notebook tool, Jupyter, provides students and educators with an interactive learning environment to accelerate programming learning. But setting up collaborative Jupyter notebooks at the classroom and institutional level can be time-consuming and costly. Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is a no-cost service built on Jupyter notebooks that takes care of the configuration and security of setting up multi-user Jupyter notebook environments – so educators can focus on teaching and learners can accelerate their journey in ML.