Tag: government

In February 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on the value of Earth observation data, the Smithsonian Open Access Initiative, and more. Watch The Brief, hosted by Sarah Worley from We Power Tech, to learn more, and scroll down for links to these stories.

While moving to the cloud saves cost when compared to on-premises IT models, it is important to inspect possible mistakes that could lead to unplanned cloud costs. Based on customer cost optimization consultations with AWS, some organizations have seen up to 33% reduction in cloud spending waste. Here we provide some tips and resources to recognize cloud cost optimization. What are some other common oversights customers make that can drive up their cloud spend? Avoid the following missteps.

For climate change adaptation and resilience, it is important to assess the risks associated with the impacts of climate change and then understand and take action to mitigate those risks. Since 1980, the U.S. has experienced 258 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. As floods become more frequent and costly and natural hazards and climate change impact physical building assets, business continuity, and asset values, big data and analytical technology can be used to create high-tech risk assessments and economic loss estimations.

This month, the Fix This podcast focused on how technology is used to preserve ancient artifacts, develop the pipeline of scientists that fuel our trips to space, and end homelessness. Listen to episodes seven and eight, featuring interviews with Digital Divide Data (DDD), NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (NASA JPL), Community Solutions, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) expert on homelessness, Jessie Metcalf.

The Smithsonian Institution announced the availability of more than 2.8 million two- and three-dimensional images and files through the Smithsonian Open Access Initiative. With this initiative, anyone with an internet connection has access to high-resolution media files, the accompanying metadata, and research from the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums, nine research centers, and zoo. This Smithsonian dataset is the largest museum collection released to date.

Maybe you’ve never thought about hackathons before. Or maybe you have a vague idea as to what they are. Or perhaps you are the champion of hundreds of hackathons. Either way, read on to learn why you should consider hackathons in a new way.

I grew up in a farming community in Kentucky, and understand how critical agriculture is to the development of a thriving and robust economy. So what can technology do to make farming and agriculture more sustainable and climate-resilient? How can we make sure crops are high quality and high yield? How do we make sure that we get them to market when they are fresh? How can we improve the way farmers interact with each other? Our customers are helping to answer these questions.

The cloud can help governments meet evolving citizen demands by enabling agility, cost savings, elasticity, and global reach. In 2008, Shared Services Canada, a federal department tasked with providing IT services to Canadian government, announced a streamlined procurement process to help support government agencies’ adoption of cloud services as part of the Government of Canada’s Cloud Adoption Strategy. To help Canadian government entities and their employees build innovative and citizen-centric services for their digital citizenry in the cloud, AWS created AWS DigiGov.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we believe the future of tech is every color, gender, belief, origin, and community. The future of tech is diverse, inclusive and accessible – but we have a long way to go before realizing this future. At AWS re:Invent 2019, We Power Tech hosted activities to teach and learn from attendees about diversity and inclusion at the intersection of technology. Check out more about what We Power Tech was up to at re:Invent 2019.

Health and human services (HHS) agencies are in the midst of dramatic change, with ever-growing transaction volumes and increasing demand for new services and visibility into data. Looking for new ways to manage constituent demands, the agencies are turning to the cloud to run mission-critical applications that administer healthcare and social benefits programs for millions of beneficiaries, resulting improved system agility, security, and costs.