AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: nonprofit

Using the cloud to create a healthier and more sustainable future, one city at a time

C40 is a network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change. C40 empowers cities to collaborate effectively, share knowledge, and drive meaningful, measurable, and sustainable action on climate change. C40 delivers insights to help city governments understand how to deliver emission reductions and climate resilience. C40’s primary platform for sharing this knowledge is the C40 Knowledge Hub, launched in 2019, to provide all participating cities with the knowledge and tools necessary to drive large-scale climate action. The Knowledge Hub is an online platform bringing together insights, practical experiences, and tested approaches from leading cities, for cities at every stage of their climate commitments.

Baltimore harbor at sunset

Addressing housing barriers with the cloud: Baltimore launches My Digital Data Locker

Removing the barriers to rehousing, especially for those chronically homeless, is a critical part of a community’s efforts to combat homelessness. This month, the City of Baltimore is launching My Digital Data Locker, an innovative cloud-based platform that gives people who are experiencing homelessness a secure place to manage digital copies of vital documents. This service reduces one of the key barriers to housing for people experiencing homelessness: vital document storage and access. The solution uses the cloud.

two women discuss something on a laptop in front of a whiteboard

What gives me hope on International Women’s Day

When I travel around the world, I try to spend time with women leaders in different organizations, industries, and walks of life. In the time we have together, I try to learn about their hopes and dreams. In those conversations, I hear both a desire to think big about the future and a struggle to balance the commitments and responsibilities that fall almost exclusively to women. The numbers are clear: the percentage of the women participating in the global labor force is declining. I recently wrote about steps we can take to recover from the last year. Today, I want to share three stories that make me hopeful that we can collectively achieve gender parity. 

Think Big for Small Business

3 things to like about the now globally available Think Big for Small Business Program

Diversity matters. Governments, countries, cities, agencies, and more recognize the value that diversity brings. According to McKinsey, companies with ethnic or cultural diversity are 33% more likely to outperform on profitability. With this in mind, I am thrilled to announce the global launch of the Think Big for Small Business Program. With the global launch of this program, I wanted to share the three things I like most about it.

AWS City on a Cloud competition 2020 city skyline

Announcing the winners of the AWS City on a Cloud competition

We are excited to announce the winners of the 2020 AWS City on a Cloud competition. Since 2014, we’ve rewarded those who have positively impacted our communities in the City on a Cloud competition. This year, the competition expanded to include finalists from over 14 countries across the globe in search of how organizations are adapting to these unprecedented times and helping cities become more resilient. From building telehealth solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, to improving farmers’ quality of life, to increasing computer science education, the winning cities and organizations went above and beyond to innovate for and with their constituents using the cloud. Check out the winners.

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.”

The Brief by AWS Public Sector - Telehealth

Telehealth, new resources, and new office: What you missed last month

Last month, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered the announcement of a new office in Athens, the launch of a new program to help GovTech startups, new education resources, and more. And on our monthly video series The Brief, we covered telehealth. Check out the episode and some of these top stories from last month in this post.

woman and man ballerinas perform on stage

Using AWS to help cultural institutions adapt to a digital world

The humanities—including performing and visual arts—help us understand and interpret the world around us. With the recent pandemic, cultural institutions are challenged as attendance is slowing, funding is diminishing, and programs are being shut down. These cultural institutions must adapt to meet the challenges of this new world. Amazon and AWS have tools to help museums, performing arts centers, and other cultural organizations extend their sphere of influence and increase their engagement with patrons, to remain relevant and better engage audiences in a digital world.

iCivics

Using digital games to teach civics

iCivics is the education nonprofit that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded in 2009 to transform civic education and rebuild civic strength through digital games and lesson plans. It is the country’s largest provider of civic education content and is currently used by more than 120,500 educators and 7.6 million students annually. All of its games are free, nonpartisan, and available at www.icivics.org. Through their use of Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS CodeDeploy—and AWS security automation tools including AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon GuardDuty—iCivics has been able to scale and increase student engagement.

How to meet business data resiliency with Amazon S3 cross-Region replication

Even though Amazon S3 provides regional data resiliency, customers often have compliance and business requirements to replicate their data to a second Region that is hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away from their primary location. Amazon S3 replication provides an automatic mechanism to make identical copies of your objects in a destination Region of your choice. Replication enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across S3 buckets. Learn how to configure S3 Cross Region Replication with S3 RTC feature, and do a walk-through of how to configure event notification for S3 replication events and configuring Amazon CloudWatch alarms for the replication metrics.