Tag: UK

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging health systems around the world. They are responding to an increase in ill patients, managing a lack of resources such as PPE, and focusing on keeping their workforce well. With worldwide deployment of vaccines still underway, health systems will need to continue transforming to adapt to managing COVID-19 alongside other health conditions. Using cloud technology has already provided benefits to health systems during the pandemic—many of which will persist into the recovery phase. AWS is helping healthcare systems accelerate the pace of research, support data-driven decision making, and facilitate the delivery of services to citizens and patients.

COVID-19 accelerated a number of rapid changes in higher education. Technology helped with continuity of education, and chief information officers (CIOs) had to overcome a number of challenges to achieve this. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ucisa, the member-led professional body for digital practitioners in education in the United Kingdom (UK), brought together CIOs from across the UK and Europe to share and discuss their recent experiences and share lessons learned. Learn their recommendations.

With AWS Cloud-based solutions, Keele University in England is now able to meet students’ and prospective students’ admissions needs virtually. Prospective students from around the globe can now tour campus remotely, and students going through the confirmation and Clearing process (a period where UK universities accept students and fill remaining seats in their incoming class if a student has not matched with their preferred institution) have a more streamlined, efficient experience. To kick-start the university-wide digital transformation, the team decided to start with an immediate need: the admissions process.

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.

University students in the United Kingdom and Ireland can now register for the AWS Educate University Challenge for a chance to win prizes for their university while building skills in the cloud. In the inter-university competition, students from the UK and Ireland earn points for their university by completing AWS Educate Cloud Career Pathways and Specialty Badges.

Dr. Nicholas Chilton and his research group at The University of Manchester’s Department of Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences investigate the magnetic properties of molecules for high-density storage, quantum computing, and applications like MRI contrast agents. He turned to the cloud when the university’s onsite HPC cluster couldn’t provide the high-throughput compute power needed to answer his research questions.