Tag: Amazon RDS

AWS EdStart Members and founders—Tan Han Sing, founder of Tueetor, and Sanjay Srivastava, founder of Vocareum—are making educational resources more accessible to students at scale. Han Sing is focused on affordably connecting learners from all backgrounds with trainers, while Sanjay is focused on closing the global digital skills gap by providing turnkey virtual labs for higher education, tech training, demo, and assessment.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems handle everything from accounting to marketing, finances to inventory, human resources to customer relations, and more. Colleges and universities commit significant infrastructure and personnel resources to run and manage these vital applications. But shifts in technology adoption, reduced availability of skilled labor, and increased economic pressures push colleges and universities to assess the return on their material ERP system investments. One way higher education institutions realize additional return on their scarce resources is by using cloud technologies. After Arizona State University (ASU) moved to AWS, the university was able to effectively allocate resources to benefit its students and solve operational problems that would otherwise require additional investment. Check out three benefits higher education institutions can recognize by moving ERP systems to the cloud.

State and local governments and health and human services (HHS) agencies provide key services to the nation’s most vulnerable and at risk populations such as healthcare, nutrition, economic, and other social support programs. HHS organizations were among the first to feel the impact of COVID-19 and its effects continue to linger and test aging infrastructure and limited technology systems. State and local government agencies made mission critical decisions to address those immediate needs and are preparing for resiliency moving forward. For this, they turned to the cloud. To help organizations discover how the cloud can help, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Health and Human Services Cloud Pavilion, an online, interactive learning environment.

Azavea believes in the power of geospatial technology to improve communities and the planet. Azavea has been exploring the power of this technology to help their clients to answer complex questions in a wide range of domains from urban ecosystems, infrastructure planning, and economic development to water, energy, and climate change. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Jessica Cahail, product manager at Azavea, to share how her organization is using AWS and open data to develop tools that help users address environmental challenges and deliver knowledge to support decision making.

Serverless applications are typically discreet pieces of code that customers can use to manage security-related processes or stitch together multiple AWS services to solve a larger problem. They allow customers to build and run applications and services without dealing with infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning. In this blog, I explain the serverless computing model, the Serverless Application Repository (SAR), solution constructs and implementations, why they matter to our government customers, and how they can use them to solve common problems.

Efforts to prevent and combat homelessness are limited by the lack of comprehensive data about people experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for states to identify trends and emerging needs to respond and make data-driven decisions about the effective deployment of resources. The cloud can help bridge information silos. Read on for examples of how states use the cloud to bridge data silos and better serve the homeless.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020 is National Voter Registration Day, a nonpartisan civic holiday in the United States celebrating democracy with a mission to create broad awareness of registration opportunities for voters. Learn how nonprofit civic organizations use the cloud to meet their mission in a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way on National Voter Registration Day and throughout the election cycle.

Working with a network of 100 biodiversity information centers and 1,000 conservation scientists, NatureServe identifies and understands the most important places to prevent species extinction and ecosystem loss. They provide land use decision-makers in federal and state agencies, industry, academics, and nonprofits with information to meet both regulatory and biodiversity conservation needs. NatureServe and its network collect and maintain data on the conservation status and location of threatened and endangered species, developed over decades of field data collection. But these data have been underutilized in environmental review decision-making processes due to challenges surrounding awareness, access, and reliable or seamless integration with other systems. To address these challenges, they developed an online spatially explicit tool on AWS.

Cancer Commons is a nonprofit network of patients, physicians, and scientists dedicated to helping patients identify and access the best personalized treatment options. Erika Vial Monteverdi, executive director of Cancer Commons, describes how the AWS compute infrastructure, combined with services like Amazon Comprehend Medical, enable physicians and patients to leverage the collective knowledge of the world’s top institutions. 

The impact of COVID-19 has K12 and higher education institutions working hard to prepare for students to return to learning that will be anything but typical. The 2020-2021 academic year will include various teaching and learning modalities—virtual, hybrid, and face-to-face—and most expect a shift from one to another throughout the year. Globally, EdTechs are working with AWS to accelerate features and solutions to better support students and educators in teaching and learning, physical and mental wellness, and health and safety.