Category: Higher education

The University of Maryland Libraries serves 41,000 students across six physical libraries on its College Park campus. Like many academic institutions, the libraries relied on aging on-premises infrastructure to support their digital services and operations. When the libraries’ IT team faced deteriorating hardware, rising licensing costs, and personnel constraints that threatened operations, they made a strategic decision: retire their data center entirely and transform their infrastructure with AWS.

Libraries are a treasure trove of knowledge, but finding what you need—especially in vast digital collections like the ones housed at Northwestern University Libraries (NUL)—isn’t always straightforward. That’s why the university chose AWS to help them build a new, multilingual, generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered search tool—one that makes its expansive collections more accessible, intuitive, and inclusive for all.

AWS is expanding its Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance to Tennessee, which becomes the sixth state in the alliance. Through a strategic collaboration with the Nashville Innovation Alliance, this partnership aims to address middle Tennessee’s growing technology talent demand, with particular emphasis on AI and cloud computing skills, where tech job postings have increased by 35 percent between 2020 and 2023, with an estimated 8,000 open technology positions across the region.

This blog explores how the University of Sheffield uses AWS Partner RONIN Core and RONIN Isolate solutions to deliver a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) built on AWS infrastructure, enabling secure research and collaboration with sensitive data through the university’s Data Connect service. Secure and compliant infrastructure is essential for sensitive research. Many research institutions use a research Landing Zone to build Secure Research Environments (SRE) that provide the foundational compliance infrastructure—meeting standards like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) NIST 800-171, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and CMMC—upon which TREs like RONIN can build secure research workflows.

The University of Michigan is breaking new ground in quantum technology accessibility through an innovative collaboration with AWS. This partnership aims to transform the university’s QREAL (Quantum Receiver Enhanced by Adaptive Learning) platform funded by the National Science Foundation into a cloud-accessible quantum testbed. Read this post to learn more.

QS Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)—a global leader in higher education analytics, insights, and services—unveiled a groundbreaking prototype called “Project Cerebrum” at the annual “Back to School” Summit in New York. Built in collaboration with AWS, Project Cerebrum introduces a new frontier in AI-powered knowledge management: a self-sustaining, agentic knowledge ecosystem that learns, adapts, and grows with the global higher education and workforce landscape.

In this blog, we will explore how customers can use Innovation Sandbox on AWS to transform the management of temporary sandbox environments, so that they can focus on driving innovation, skill building, and developing the next big technological breakthrough.

Kansas State University (K-State)—In collaboration with AWS and AWS Partner, ROK Technologies—is developing Geocat: a scalable, cloud-native ArcGIS Enterprise platform. Designed to serve students, faculty, and extension professionals, Geocat is advancing K-State’s land-grant mission by making cutting-edge geospatial infrastructure accessible across the university and beyond.

Read this post to learn how Baylor College of Medicine’s Human Genome Sequencing Center migrated its Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to a secure, hybrid cloud environment in collaboration with AWS. The migration strengthened the system’s reliability, improved security, lowered costs—all while laying the groundwork for future growth.

University central IT teams serve as the backbone of campus-wide technology operations, managing critical infrastructure, services, and security that power both academic and administrative functions. These teams are responsible for orchestrating complex cloud environments across multiple AWS accounts, making sure they meet institutional standards while enabling innovation across the campus community.