AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: Amazon RDS

man and son work in woodshop to build birdhouse

Purpose-built databases: The model for building applications in the cloud

The era of the cloud has simply accelerated the push to microservices as organizations want to adopt new, distributed models for building applications to drive agility, innovation, and efficiency. The AWS portfolio of purpose-built databases can help with this movement. AWS offers a broad and deep portfolio of purpose-built databases that support diverse data models and allow customers to build data driven, highly scalable, distributed applications. This allows you to pick the best database to solve a specific problem and break away from restrictive commercial databases to focus on building applications to meet the needs of their organization.

blue data dots connecting in form of mortarboard

How Times Higher Education accelerated their journey with the AWS Data Lab

Times Higher Education (THE) is a data-driven business that, with the help of AWS, is now realising the value of their data, which enables them to be better informed and make faster decisions for customers. THE provides a broad range of services to help set the agenda in higher education, and their insights help universities improve through performance analysis. THE worked with the AWS Data Lab to create a centralised repository of their data. Launching a data lake helped with providing a cost-effective platform and cataloguing data so they could understand their data and design new products to make use of it.

global map in blue showing connecting cities

Combating illicit activity by tracking flight data via the cloud

Many organizations including the intelligence community, security organizations, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, news organizations, and non-governmental organizations work together to disrupt transnational crime networks. Their missions include combating illicit trade; disrupting human, animal, and narcotics trafficking; detecting money laundering; and exposing political corruption. This community needs rapid analysis of large, diverse streams of information about air transportation networks, because air transportation is the fastest way to conduct illicit trade internationally. The nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) built the Icarus Flights application to meet this need. By building on AWS using managed cloud services, C4ADS spends less time and energy managing infrastructure, which frees them to focus on building innovative analytics and alerting services that their user community needs.

Amazon RaiseUp Buildathon

Building innovative solutions to help nonprofits with fundraising, content delivery, and mission delivery

Nonprofits and cultural institutions need support to serve and deliver impact to our local and global communities. Amazon’s Raise-up Buildathon, presented by AWS, empowered developers, technology enthusiasts, and advocates to build cloud solutions that enhance digital capabilities to help with fundraising, content delivery, and mission delivery. The majority of the winning solutions are available to nonprofits and cultural institutions via open source. Learn more about what these solutions can do, from donor management to augmented reality, to improving how you reach out to constituents to expand your donation stream.

aerial view of yellow sneakers on blue sports surface

Using AWS for on-premises WordPress site continuity

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.

Hope orbiter Mars, photo courtesy of MBRSC, United Arab Emirates

UAE Mars mission uses AWS to advance scientific discoveries

On February 9, a new object successfully began to orbit Mars: an uncrewed spacecraft called the Hope Probe. The mission has already returned the first image of Mars, taken by Hope’s Emirates eXploration Imager from an altitude of 24,700 km. Led by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), the Hope Probe is the first interplanetary mission for the United Arab Emirates, the fifth country in history to reach the red planet. It will also be the first spacecraft to capture a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers during different times of the day and different seasons for one complete Martian year. Once data transmitted by the Hope Probe reaches the scientific teams on Earth, MBRSC will use AWS advanced technologies to process and analyze the vast amounts of data and imagery to help researchers better understand the Martian atmosphere and its layers.

Safer Internet Day

Empowering adults and children to make the internet a safer place

Every year, Safer Internet Day brings together schools, teachers, parents, caregivers, and organisations around the world to promote a safer internet and the responsible use of online technology and mobile phones. This year on Tuesday, February 9, Safer Internet Day marks their 18th year, this year focusing on the topic, “An internet we trust: Exploring reliability in the online world.”

Global Founders TestWe CollegeDekho

EdTechs evolve college admissions and testing processes for students

AWS EdStart Members—Clément Régnier, co-founder and CEO of TestWe in France, and Ruchir Arora, founder and CEO of CollegeDekho in India—are simplifying and reducing the exam and college admissions process for students. TestWe creates a secure, offline, and comfortable exam experience for students. CollegeDekho acts as the liaison between colleges and students, connecting students with an array of services through the college admission process. Read on to learn how these founders are developing the next generation of education solutions.

Alayacare

AlayaCare reimagines in-home and virtual care with AWS

AlayaCare, a Canada-based health technology organization founded in 2014, offers a platform for home and community care organizations. The cloud-based platform provides an end-to-end solution for care providers, including back office functionality, client and family portals, remote patient monitoring, and mobile care worker functionality. AlayaCare aims to help care providers by arming them with the technology and data insights they need to deliver personalized care. Using AWS, AlayaCare is building their vision of the future of in-home and virtual care.

data center cloud

A pragmatic approach to RPO zero

Nobody wants to lose data—and setting a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to zero makes this intent clear. Customers with government mission-critical systems often need to meet this requirement, since any amount of data loss will cause harm. RPO covers both resilience and disaster recovery—everything from the loss of an individual physical disk to an entire data center. Existing systems support RPO zero through a combination of architecture patterns (including resilient messaging) and on-premises legacy databases. Frequently interpreted as a database or storage requirement, providing for RPO zero requires thinking about the entire system. To do so, you can use AWS services and architecture patterns, which provide resilience to failure with clustering, auto scaling, and failover across multiple data centers within one region.