Tag: Australia

Earlier this year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) ran the Australian Census, the agency’s most significant workload, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Census is the most comprehensive snapshot of the country, and includes around 10 million households and over 25 million people. With the COVID-19 pandemic causing lockdowns across the country, ABS needed a digital option for the Census that was accessible and reliable for millions of people. They turned to the cloud.

In 2021, one in six Australians—almost four million people—have hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound. The statistic is part of the larger global picture reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) that approximately 466 million people live with hearing loss; of these, 34 million are children. In addition, 1.1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss due to exposure to noise in recreational settings and through personal audio devices. AWS offers services that will help organizations build end-to-end solutions with accessibility in mind and improve day-to-day activities such as social interactions, clinical consultations, live media, and public service announcements.

The maturing of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought ready-made services that organizations can use, not only to automate data entry work but also to apply intelligence into the business process. Using modern AI capabilities on AWS, organizations can transform approaches to document management. This allows public sector organizations to save time (enabling faster throughput especially during higher volume paperwork times), so they can help get constituents their services faster, and focus on the most valuable work of the high-touch or high-need cases. Document automation helps reduce human entry error and provide backup services in case of natural disaster.

This week, AWS released the report, “Unlocking APAC’s Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches.” Prepared by strategy and economics consulting firm AlphaBeta and commissioned by AWS, the report analyzes the digital skills applied by workers in their jobs today and the digital skills required by workforces over the next five years. The report focuses on six Asia Pacific countries: Singapore, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea.

Digital transformation is a concept that is high on the agenda of many governments. Many large public sector organizations are undertaking mass migrations: the movement of a meaningful portion of your organization’s existing IT assets to the cloud. This might consist of a data center, a collection of data centers, a business unit, or some other portfolio of systems that is larger than a single application. Here are some top tips and real-life learnings for public sector organizations looking to execute a successful cloud migration strategy.

Swinburne University, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced the creation of Australia’s first cloud degree program. The associate degree of applied technologies – cloud technologies will help undergraduates prepare for in-demand careers in cloud computing. Swinburne created the degree through a collaboration with AWS Educate, Amazon’s global initiative to provide students and educators with resources for building skills in cloud technology.

The rapid acceleration of digital transformation has raised expectations for efficient and effective engagement with service providers. Many expect the same engagement with government agencies as they do from consumer services such as video-on-demand, ecommerce, and online food delivery. In Australia, the government is prioritising delivering services through technology in a fast and secure way. The CSCP was closed in March 2020 and the ISM was updated to remove the requirement to select services from the Certified Cloud Services List (CCSL). However, the discontinuation of the CSCP does not alter Amazon Web Services (AWS) commitment to help Australian Government agencies innovate rapidly and securely.

With the recent news of the Australian Cyber Security Centre certifying AWS to PROTECTED – the highest data security certification available in Australia for cloud service providers – many public sector customers in the region want to know how to get started on the cloud. To help, AWS created the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Public Sector Agency FastStart Guide.

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Australia announced the launch of its Cyber Ready Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC). The CIC will focus on cloud-based cyber security solutions, enabling students to tackle cyber issues in the real world through innovative cloud computing approaches and emerging technology.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa). DE Africa is enabling African nations to track changes across the continent in unprecedented detail by making Earth observation (EO) data more easily accessible. This will provide valuable insights for better decision-making around prevention and planning in areas including flooding, droughts, soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, forest-cover, land use and land cover change, water availability and quality, and changes to human settlements.