Tag: EMEA

Around the world, exams are administered to help students and adults further their education and advance their careers. In the US, approximately eight million high school students took a single standardized college entrance exam in 2019. As the pandemic shifted life to virtual work and learning, it also interrupted high stakes exams typically administered in person. For years, EdTechs like ExamSoft, Sumadi (part of Laureate Education), and ProctorFree have been developing remote proctoring and digital assessment solutions using the cloud.

Since universities typically face reliable bursts of traffic, such as on admissions day, they are not often concerned with the ability to scale infinitely—a key reason for going serverless. By doing so with AWS, the University of York now has the ability to scale down to zero, which helps the university better manage applications, reduce costs, and increase agility.

Using data for commercial advantage and improved citizen services is at the heart of Europe’s next wave of initiatives. GAIA-X is an initiative that aims to bring together representatives from business, science, and politics to help define standards for the next generation of data infrastructure, which includes an open transparent and secure digital ecosystem, where data and services can be made available, collated, and shared in an environment of trust. AWS has participated in multiple GAIA-X technical working groups and has actively supported the initiative from its beginning. We’re here to help our European customers and partners accelerate cloud-driven innovation in Europe—to compete at home and globally. As we announce our membership of GAIA-X, it’s important to understand what’s driving our involvement and support.

As education has shifted to remote delivery, traditional mechanisms for engaging students and creating practical learning opportunities have had to adapt too. One mechanism—the hackathon—is increasingly taking place virtually. Typically, hackathons are in-person technology events where teams or individuals create solutions to a specific problem or challenge in a short timeframe, often 24 hours or a weekend. Hackathons are also social learning events where peers can connect, learn from each other, seek support from technical experts, and produce a cool (even if imperfect) solution. Cloud technology tools and resources can help virtual hackathons be as successful as traditional hackathons.

A new agreement between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the UK government will accelerate adoption of cloud computing in the public sector while saving taxpayer money, boosting digital skills across the civil service, and increasing the diversity of suppliers to the government by helping more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to take part in public sector contracts. The agreement, called the “One Government Value Agreement” (OGVA), is a three-year, Memorandum of Understanding between AWS and the Crown Commercial Service (CCS). By treating participating UK government and public sector organisations as a single client, it offers greater cost savings for cloud deployments, similar to those available to large commercial customers.

The global network of Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aims to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. The CIC program brings students, researchers, and the technology expertise of AWS together to solve public sector challenges and gives students the opportunity to engage in project-based learning. Check out some of the CIC challenges during the third quarter of 2020.

Halcyon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of an intensive incubator program for early-stage women-founded social enterprise technology startups based in Bahrain. The 2021 Bahrain Women’s Intensive program will help social entrepreneurs scale their ventures and use AWS Cloud technology to help innovate and grow. The program for tech startups is now accepting applications.

At the AWS Public Sector Summit Online, Max Peterson, vice president of international sales for the public sector, spoke about our new reality responding to a global pandemic—and how customers who have taken steps to transform digitally are already benefiting from their progress. Through the lens of customers’ and partners’ experience, Max shared lessons learned and how to apply these lessons to your cloud journey. Those four key lessons? Move fast, have an agile platform, keep innovating, and think big. Read on for more.

The University of Bahrain (UoB), the Kingdom’s largest university with over 28,000 students, is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The university is in the final phase of migrating its entire IT infrastructure to AWS. Once finalized, UoB becomes the largest university in the Middle East to migrate its core applications—student information system (SIS), correspondence management system (CMS), homepage portal, and subdomain, and all backend systems—to AWS.

Governments, like the state government of California, are in the midst of a transition to a new way of delivering vital information, services and programs using technology and the cloud. Government organizations are adopting approaches pioneered in the technology industry, including user-centered design, agile development, data science, modular contracting, and the use of modern technology platforms. Many of these governments, like the state of California, are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to respond quickly and scale to battle unprecedented challenges, like COVID-19, and help them quickly make decisions about how to protect their constituents.