AWS Public Sector Blog

To better understand the challenges and opportunities in digital healthcare adoption, think tank ACCESS Health International and the AWS Institute conducted research across 12 countries in the Asia Pacific in order to understand government and industry perspectives on cloud adoption for public healthcare. The findings are presented in the “Overcoming Barriers to Cloud Adoption in Public Healthcare in the Asia-Pacific” report. Read on for a summary of the research’s key findings.

The Brazilian Space Agency and Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a Statement of Strategic Intent and Cooperation. The initiative, on which the Brazilian Embassy in Washington also collaborated, is the first of its kind for AWS in Latin America, and will support innovation and the continued growth of the country’s space industry.

The extensive higher education landscape in India poses many challenges, like the rising complexity of administrative and academic activities, increase in student enrollment from a tech-savvy generation, data security issues, and more. The education technology (EdTech) company CollPoll is a full-stack web- and mobile-based campus automation, digital learning, and analytics platform designed to address these challenges with artificial intelligence powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). CollPoll uses the cloud to provide end-to-end automation of key academic and administrative processes to bring digital transformation solutions to educational institutions in India and around the world.

The United Kingdom (UK) government’s 2011 Skills for Life survey estimated that about 49% of UK adults had levels of numeracy—the ability to understand and use math in real-life situations—on par with primary school children. In response, National Numeracy, a nonprofit to help UK adults increase numeracy, was founded in 2012. Leveraging AWS, National Numeracy established a digital-first approach to engage UK communities with educational resources that help improve real-world math skills that can help them better manage their finances, find new job opportunities, assist their children in math, and more.

Governments are increasingly adopting digital ID systems to improve inclusion and accessibility to public services. Based on the experiences shared by governments and by AWS experts who have worked to implement digital ID around the world, six lessons emerge about how to create the right strategic mindset for digital ID creation and implementation.

Disaster recovery is a crucial investment for public sector organizations. However, out-of-date disaster recovery and business continuity planning (BCP) policies prevent organizations from improving in these essential areas—like the assumption that the more distance between data centers, the better. But is there a point where more distance between data centers has diminishing risk mitigation returns? Enter the Goldilocks zone for disaster recovery, in which the distance between data centers is not too close, not too far, but just right.

AWS announced over 85 new services and features at re:Invent 2021, with something to offer for every industry — including K12 education. These new services and features unlock new use cases and lower the barrier to entry for schools looking to adopt cloud technology to better serve their students, parents, and staff. Read on for highlights of some of the key AWS announcements from re:Invent 2021 that can help K12 education.

How do we avoid the next global pandemic? For researchers collaborating with the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Center (UBC CIC), the answer to that question lies in a massive library of genetic sequencing data. But there is a problem: the data library is so massive that traditional computing can’t comprehensively analyze or process it. So the UBC CIC team collaborated with computational virologists to create Serratus, an open-science viral discovery platform to transform the field of genomics—built on the massive computational power of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. We work with data providers to democratize access to data by making it available to the public for analysis on AWS; to develop new cloud-native techniques, formats, and tools that lower the cost of working with data; and to encourage the development of communities that benefit from access to shared datasets. This quarter, we released 19 new or updated datasets like validated OpenStreetMap data, bioacoustic data, COVID-19 detection data, and more.

It takes a medical village to discover and diagnose rare diseases. The National Institutes of Health’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) is made up of a coordinating center, 12 clinical sites, a model organism screening center, a metabolomics core, a sequencing core, and a biorepository. For many years prior to the UDN, the experts at these sites were limited by antiquated data-sharing procedures. The UDN leadership realized that if they wanted to scale up and serve as many patients as possible, they needed to transform how they process, store, and share medical data—which led the UDN to the AWS Cloud.