Tag: UK

Healthier Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS) looks after the health and social care needs of a population of 1.8 million citizens across the North West of the UK. One of the main goals of the ICS is to work collaboratively with all partners involved in care delivery for their geography. To this end, the ICS recognized that using cloud technologies allows for better data sharing to improve patient outcomes.

At The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association (Guide Dogs), we provide a variety of services and support to anyone affected by sight loss, their friends, and their family. Our mission is to give them access to information and support to make a positive impact on their well-being, self-confidence, self-esteem and ability to function with loss of sight. Voice assistants powered by AWS allow our organization to support our communities and enrich their quality of life.

The United Kingdom (UK) government’s 2011 Skills for Life survey estimated that about 49% of UK adults had levels of numeracy—the ability to understand and use math in real-life situations—on par with primary school children. In response, National Numeracy, a nonprofit to help UK adults increase numeracy, was founded in 2012. Leveraging AWS, National Numeracy established a digital-first approach to engage UK communities with educational resources that help improve real-world math skills that can help them better manage their finances, find new job opportunities, assist their children in math, and more.

NHS Digital launched NHS login, a serverless identity platform to facilitate access to a range of health and care apps for residents in England, with AWS, amongst other suppliers. Using the AWS Cloud, NHS Digital achieves scale, high availability, and security for citizens accessing these services, and helps users access NHS services quicker and more simply. NHS login is one of a number of services NHS Digital are hosting on the cloud as part of the UK government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy.

Since its launch in June of 2019, the Authority to Operate on AWS (ATO on AWS) program has supported more than 300 US-based customers to meet their regulatory, security, and compliance requirements on AWS. To extend that support globally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Global Security and Compliance Acceleration (GSCA) initiative. The GSCA is now available to support customers in the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU).

How do you predict and prepare for your citizens’ health and wellness needs during the COVID-19 pandemic? Healthier Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS) quickly scaled a platform on AWS to support the 1.8 million people in their region with Nexus Intelligence, an interactive health intelligence application with a suite of predictive models against various measures of need and health outcomes. Nexus Intelligence not only supported the ICS response to the pandemic, but is expected to help reconfigure and re-invest in services to improve the health and well-being of the population and reduce health inequalities.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for both faster digital transformation and urgent development of digital skills in the public sector. A new IDC study, which surveyed 250 health, government, and education organisations in seven countries across Europe, has now revealed the full extent of the IT challenges the public sector faces.

Research exploring how humans work with machines to solve problems in fields ranging from space to sustainability has established the potential to create far-reaching change in children’s education. The test-bed project is part of a wider program set up by Oxford University with support from AWS. Researchers have been as surprised by how quickly they have reached results as they are pleased with the outcomes. One of the test-beds, the Oxford X-Reality Hub Ed Tech project, set out to investigate how virtual reality (VR) could transform the classroom experience and close the gap between disadvantaged groups of pupils who statistically do less well than their peers.

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.

Looking at information security as an enabler for change, not a blocker, was the mind shift that contributed to digital transformation in UK government. The UK modernization of data classification concepts and processes enabled more responsive public services, as well as massive savings (£1.7bn in 2014 alone). From 2012 through 2015, the authors of this blog worked together in the Cabinet Office in the UK to reform a decades-old information security policy. This effort helped unlock widespread cloud adoption in the UK public sector and the advantages that come with it.