AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

We are pleased to announce that the Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Foundation’s TrustTheVote™ Project is utilizing AWS to ensure that the democratic process is not threatened by archaic and obsolete systems. Often, these systems are no longer supported by manufacturers, and in the case of voting machinery, rely on proprietary software that’s difficult to inspect or audit.

OSET is a 501(c)(3) non-profit election technology research institute focused on creating open source software for elections administration in the US and around the world. The TrustTheVote™ Project is an open source software initiative that develops and provides an election technology framework with apps. States and counties can then adopt, adapt, and deploy the software to administer elections. Currently, OSET offers apps for states’ online voter registration services, with ballot design and election results reporting in development and testing. More apps are on the way for all aspects of election administration. The cloud-driven open source approach means that any election jurisdiction can adopt and adapt OSET’s apps and launch them faster and more cost effectively than ever before.

Election officials have to deal with aging hardware, shrinking budgets, and inefficient processes, while managing chaotic election logistics, polling place volunteers, and local web sites that often crash when everyone simultaneously wants election results. Cloud technology, combined with open data, open standards, and open source development, offers an ideal solution for elections administration with no hardware to buy or maintain, unlimited capacity for traffic, and a pay-as-you-go model.

The OSET Foundation is driving increased innovation in elections technology, like voter registration services, ballot creation, election results reporting, analytics, and voter information services with zero-footprint data center solutions that were not possible with traditional IT infrastructure. Since it’s on AWS GovCloud (US), the TrustTheVote Project technology can be used by any state or county looking to quickly improve elections administration without the high costs and long time frames of old computer systems.

OSET chose to make its software available on AWS GovCloud (US), because it offers the security and compliance for sensitive data, while having the scalability, agility, and cost savings of not buying hardware. And it can be quickly and easily delivered anywhere in the country.

Cloud-based voter registration, ballot design, and elections results reporting are ideal starting points to lowering costs and improving the public trust in our democracy.

AWS is excited to announce that we are partnering with TechSoup Global (TSG), a nonprofit technology network that connects nonprofit organizations with discounted or donated tech products and services, to provide AWS credits to nonprofits. Through the AWS Credit Program, nonprofits get access to selected, packaged AWS Cloud services.

From issue advocacy to charitable causes, from health and welfare to wildlife, over 17,500 nonprofit organizations are already using AWS to radically reduce infrastructure costs, build their capacity, and reduce waste. With AWS, nonprofits don’t have to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend time and effort managing that hardware.

Instead, organizations can provision exactly the computing resources they need to power their organizations and keep focus on the mission. Our expansive technology platform allows nonprofits of all sizes to run lean and frees them to be fast, agile, and even global, while still being efficient with IT spend, paying only for what they use.

Lack of access to the most up-to-date IT infrastructure services should not stand in the way of nonprofits from accomplishing their mission. Through the Nonprofit Credit Program with TechSoup Global, AWS enables nonprofits to accomplish their missions by helping to subsidize their infrastructure costs. Eligible nonprofits will receive $2,000 worth of AWS service credits annually to be used towards Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon WorkMail, and Amazon WorkSpaces.

What Do You Get?

• $2,000 worth of AWS service credits annually.
• Packaged services include: Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon WorkMail, and Amazon WorkSpaces.
• Guidance on how to get started with AWS.
• Access to the AWS Free Tier & Self Starter Package for nonprofits interested in AWS services beyond the packaged services offered.

The AWS Nonprofit Credit Program at TechSoup provides support to eligible nonprofits, charities, and public libraries throughout the United States by providing promotional credits to subsidize cloud infrastructure costs. To access your credits, go to: www.techsoup.org/amazon-web-services

“Being able to announce our partnership with AWS means together we are able to meet a very specific need for the nonprofit community. By bringing this generous offer to the sector, AWS is enabling nonprofits to benefit from cloud-based solutions with top tier support. This program goes a long way toward helping TechSoup deliver on its promise to connect changemakers worldwide with the technology they need to improve lives,” said Gayle Samuelson Carpentier, Chief Business Development Officer, TechSoup.

Learn more about AWS for nonprofits at the Nonprofit Technology Conference March 23-25, 2016 in San Jose, CA. Come visit us at booth #624 to engage with AWS staff, view booth demos, participate in daily raffles of Amazon devices, and learn from our live product demonstration on Workspaces.

And don’t forget about our monthly nonprofit office hours where you can speak directly with one of our solutions architects!

A guest post by Darren Catalano, CEO of HelioCampus and former vice president of analytics at University of Maryland University College (UMUC).

Higher Education is at a tipping point. External factors, including an increased focus on student success and decreased revenue from previously reliable sources, are putting more pressure on institutions to become more efficient and show better results. Institutions cannot remain idle as the landscape changes. Instead, innovative universities are using analytics as a strategic enabler to transform the university and to change its culture.  If you enjoy tackling big challenges, you are in the right place!

Whether you are a Chief Data Officer, Institutional Researcher, or BI Developer, we must seize the opportunity to transform our role on campus. The onus is on us to make a compelling argument that we are part of the solution by highlighting our capabilities and showing the university “the art of the possible” when it comes to unlocking the value in our institutional data.

Transparency promotes accountability

In order to facilitate meaningful conversations and to elevate our role, we must be much more proactive and engage the university community in a significantly different way. Before we would ask: what are your requirements? What do you want? And then build, test, and release. Those days are in the past. We can no longer show up to meetings with a blank sheet of paper. Now, we need to show what could be. To achieve this, we need to rapidly deploy models that can provide an immediate impact.

The cloud allows universities to cost effectively and securely host, process, and deliver data analytics services. Institutions should focus on building a data platform that connects disparate data from sources across the university enterprise and transforms the information into flexible data models. These models accelerate the ability to prototype and quickly answer ad hoc requests. We must focus on providing easy access to the modeled data by delivering a service catalog that includes easy-to-understand dashboards, predictive applications, forecast models, and operational reporting.

But how do we get to this point where data is critical in all decisions around student enrollment, engagement, and success?

Key to overcoming this challenge is demonstrating the potential – the “art of the possible” to university stakeholders in order to demonstrate the benefits of having a unified data layer. For example, by combining data sets, we can analyze transfer, retention, and graduation rates in comparison with admissions data to see differences in profiles; combine prospective student and pre-enrollment data with retention data to spot significant retention impacting variables; and look at first-term class registration patterns to determine the impact on course success.

Demonstrating the potential

Analytics in higher education have never been more important and those institutions that thrive will use their data as a competitive advantage. Cultural change does not happen by accident but rather it is the result of a consistent intentional effort. In order to facilitate cultural change on campus, follow these five lessons learned:

1. Invest in a solution
2. Organize for performance
3. Empower leaders to use data
4. Embrace transparency
5. Highlight success

Our job is to take the complexity out of the data and present it in an easily understood and consumable fashion. Data has the ability to make transformational changes within an institution. For a practical example of how a large university used data and analytics to improve their student success, read the blog post highlighting UMUC.

AWS Makes Cloud and HPC Budgeting More Predictable for Scientists

The pace of research is no longer limited by the availability of computing resources. Researchers are beginning to rely on cloud computing to drive breakthrough science at breakneck speeds and AWS wants to fuel the pace of new discoveries by making it possible for all scientists to have their very own supercomputers in the cloud.

Today, AWS committed to making it easier for scientists to use its cloud storage, computing, and database services by waiving data egress fees for qualified researchers and academic customers; these are fees associated with “data transfer out from AWS to the Internet.” The maximum discount is 15% of total monthly spending on AWS services, which is several times the usage we typically see among our research customers. However, there is no cost to upload data into AWS, or move data between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

The agreement has been supported through ongoing discussions with Jisc in the UK, GÉANT in Europe, and DLT in the United States, which provide network infrastructure and supporting cloud services to education and research institutions around the world.

“Having predictability and stability in costs is one of the major challenges for researchers in adopting cloud services, so it’s welcome news that AWS is removing egress charges for academic customers. There’s a real opportunity here for cloud computing to become as ubiquitous to research as it is in the commercial market, and with it bring a massive boon to the sector, supporting more efficient, collaborative and innovative research outputs,” said Dan Perry, director of product and marketing at Jisc.

Professor Tony Hey, chief data scientist for the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), said, “I am delighted that AWS is taking this step to remove uncertainty about egress charging for research use of their cloud infrastructure, following extensive discussions with Jisc and GÉANT. I often hear from researchers that the perception that they will receive large bills for data downloads has discouraged them from considering commercial cloud providers for their compute and data requirements. The cloud has a huge amount to offer in terms of agility and efficiency gains, and also unique capabilities in areas such as machine learning. This is a very welcome development from AWS, and I hope that other cloud providers will move swiftly to follow suit.”

By reducing data egress fees, AWS will to help scientists launch their first computing machine in minutes, analyze data pipelines, and store petabytes of data in the cloud, ultimately accelerating time-to-science.

AWS customers are eligible for waiver of egress charges under this program if they:

• Work in academic or research institutions.
• Run any research workloads or academic workloads.  However, a few data-egress-as-a-service type applications are not allowed under this program, like web hosting, media streaming, or massively online open courseware (MOOC).
• Route at least 80% of their Data Egress out of the AWS Cloud through an approved National Research and Education (NREN) network, such as Internet2, ESnet, GÉANT, Janet, SingAREN, SINET, AARNet, and CANARIE. Most research institutions use these government-funded, dedicated networks to connect to AWS, while realizing higher network performance, better bandwidth, and stability.
• Use institutional e-mail addresses for AWS accounts.
• Work in an approved AWS Region.

Request the AWS Data Egress Waiver: Contact your AWS Account Manager or use the “Contact Us” form and mention “Data Egress Waiver Request.”

Scientists can get started with a Free Tier Account: www.aws.amazon.com/free.

Learn more about Scientific Computing on AWS at: www.aws.amazon.com/scico.

Federal government agencies are adrift in a digital sea of big data. To stay afloat, these agencies need to gather, store, manage, process, analyze and use the massive amounts of data they collect every day from a variety of sources.

We have found that agencies that leverage cloud computing and big data analytics platforms can meet their IT infrastructure needs more efficiently and save money in the process.

The push for government agencies to move to cloud-based big data analytics is also being driven by the Internet of Things (IoT)— the ever-expanding network of physical “things” that can connect to the Internet along with the information they transfer without requiring human interaction.

As more federal agencies adopt IoT tools, they’ll need a managed cloud platform that lets them connect devices easily so they can securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.

For example, to respond to rapidly changing market dynamics, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), one of the largest independent securities regulators in the United States, has moved its platform to AWS. The reason: so FINRA can analyze and store approximately 30 billion daily market events it receives from exchanges and U.S. firms. With that data, FINRA creates an overall picture of financial markets, highlighting any wrongdoing.

Read the full Washington Post article on IoT here to learn more about how FINRA, Quorum, and other organizations are leveraging big data analytics in the cloud.

We are excited to announce our seventh annual AWS Government, Education and Nonprofits Summit scheduled for June 20-21, 2016.

Join us for one of the largest gatherings of government, education and nonprofit technology leaders sharing their firsthand stories of innovation for the public good. Last year’s summit featured a star line up including the CIOs of the US, UK, Canada, and Singapore, as well as IT leaders from agencies and organizations near and far.

This year, we are excited to welcome Andy Jassy, Amazon SVP and the visionary leader of Amazon Web Services, along with even more customers innovating in mobility, the Internet of Things, scientific computing, advanced security, open data, and more. The Summit includes over 80 breakout sessions, direct access to AWS technologists, hands-on labs, and inspiring customer spotlights.

Check out this video to get a flavor for the event.

Stay tuned to Worldwide Public Sector Events for more information as we add speakers and events.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), based in Golden, Colorado, is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy-efficiency research and development. They are a true cloud visionary making an impact across renewable energy and energy efficiency research by bringing energy data access to the forefront.

Sharing information and fostering collaboration among scientific communities are long-standing goals for NREL. If more people are able to access the data, then more discoveries can be made. NREL’s OpenEI.org Open Energy Information portal is focused on publishing and sharing research data from a variety of sources. The organization currently hosts dozens of public-facing websites, which are updated frequently with the latest energy information.

To build a collaborative data repository, NREL needed to find a platform to meet all of its specific needs to create a scalable environment, so it is possible for anyone to use the site. Yet, it must be secure, due to the sensitivity of the data involved (to comply with all mandated FISMA cyber security requirements).

NREL turned to AWS to design and launch a moderate cloud environment to host data, such as the new Marine Hydrokinetic Data Repository (MHKDR) application, a geothermal energy research database, and several other sites that focus on collaboration and data access. Once the data can officially be released, the public gets access to the data for research purposes.

NREL is utilizing the AWS Cloud for ground-breaking energy data access web platforms and is able to focus on data quality and continue to share their research to others to make a difference in our environment. Learn more about the immediate benefits they received that helped their research and the research community here.

Over 50 AWS volunteers were excited to collaborate with the Clark County School District (CCSD) on our inaugural AWS Educate “Cloud in the Classroom Day” earlier this month. We worked with 68 students on sessions such as Gaming in the Cloud, Alexa Voice Skills, and Cloud Careers at Rancho High School and Cimarron-Memorial High School in order to support the workforce and economic development of the community around Las Vegas, NV. Following the workshops, the AWS Educate team met with CCSD faculty and staff to brainstorm ideas for bringing cloud into high school curriculum. And to cap off the activities, Kylie Pratt, high school senior and president of the globally-ranked Cimarron Robotics Team, and her coach, Jenny Stensrud, joined Teresa Carlson and Helen Sun, VP Motorola Solutions, to provide insights on girls, technology, and the high school curriculum.

Highlights from the Cloud in the Classroom

• 30 students at Rancho High School customized a Jumpy Fish Game running on AWS by adding new graphics, hacking the leaderboard, and setting up new top score notifications using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda.
• 38 students at Cimarron-Memorial High School developed new voice skills for Alexa by creating a Lambda function in the AWS console and a new voice skill with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) in the Amazon Developer Portal.
• After the technical workshops, students from both schools learned about careers in cloud and got a chance to quiz Amazonians on what they do and why they like working at Amazon.
• AWS Educate facilitated a roundtable with 20 CCSD faculty and staff led by Gia Marie Moore, Director, Magnet Schools and Career and Technical Academies, CCSD, and Dr. Jesse Welsh, Academic Manager of Innovative Learning Environments, CCSD, for an initial discussion of the cloud, preparing students for the cloud workforce, and the best path to integrate the cloud into career and technical education (CTE) curricula for CCSD. This includes targeting existing classes, developing a multi-course curriculum, providing professional development, and integrating free cloud “sandboxes” for students into the project-based learning environment.

Rancho High School’s “Gaming in the Cloud” workshop

The workshop used a modified version of Jumpy Fish. The students logged in to the AWS console, used S3 to upload a new sprite for the game, used DynamoDB to hack the leaderboard and insert a new high score for the game, and add a function call (pre-configured) in a Lambda to send out a text message notification of a new high score. The students customized the game images with clever graphics and inserted whimsy into the leaderboard. Two students worked in a separate exercise to “hack” the game. Following the workshop, students attended a “Cloud Careers” session.

Cimarron-Memorial High School’s “Create Your Own Voice  Skill’ workshop

This workshop used Alexa and Lambda with an Amazon Echo. Students explored the AWS console, used S3 to download files for the labs, created a Lambda function, explored the Amazon Developer Portal, used the ASK to configure their skill and integrate with the Lambda function, and tested their skills on an Echo. AWS volunteers circulated throughout the room to encourage, help, and cheer as each group got to test their working skills on the Echos in the room. Students were engaged and excited to create and test skills, including queries on the best gaming platform, favorite restaurant, favorite color, and worst NFL team in 2015. Following the workshop, students split into small groups and Amazon volunteers shared their experiences, answered questions, and discussed career pathways.

Learn more about AWS Educate and how to bring the cloud to your classroom here.

US service members returning from active duty can face many challenges—including finding a new job or even a new career. To help veterans succeed, we’ve worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs to make AWS Certification exams eligible for VA reimbursement.

Are you a US veteran? Find out more about AWS Certifications and how you can be reimbursed for AWS Certification exams on Jeff Barr’s original blog post here.

AWS Certifications recognize IT professionals with the technical expertise to design, deploy, and operate applications and infrastructure on AWS. Career transitions are never easy, but cloud IT presents one promising path forward—especially when industry surveys show that these skills remain in short supply.

Our hope is that easier access to our certification exam, combined with the unique talents veterans already possess, will open up more career possibilities for retired servicemen and servicewomen and help them achieve success in their post-military careers.

Learn more and find answers to common questions here.

To achieve full benefits of moving applications to the AWS platform, it is critical to design a cloud migration model that delivers optimal cost efficiency. This includes establishing a compelling business case, acquiring new skills within the IT organization, implementing new business processes, and defining the application migration methodology to transform your business model from a traditional on-premises computing platform to a cloud infrastructure.

A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration: Migrating Services to AWS white paper coauthored by AWS’s Blake Chism and Carina Veksler provides a high-level overview of the cloud migration process based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and is a great first read for customers who are thinking about cloud adoption.

The path to the cloud is a journey to business results. AWS has helped hundreds of customers, such as City of McKinney, TX and Georgetown University, achieve their business goals at every stage of their journey. While every organization’s path will be unique, there are common patterns, approaches, and best practices that can be implemented to streamline the process.

1. Define your approach to cloud computing from business case to strategy and change management to technology.
2. Build a solid foundation for your enterprise workloads on AWS by assessing and validating your application portfolio, and integrating your unique IT environment with solutions based on AWS cloud services.
3. Design and optimize your business applications to be cloud-aware, taking direct advantage of the benefits of AWS services.
4. Meet your internal and external compliance requirements by developing and implementing automated security policies and controls based on proven, validated designs.

Early planning, communication, and buy-in are essential. Understanding the forcing function (time, cost, and availability) is key and will be different for each organization. When defining the migration model, organizations must have a clear strategy, map out a realistic project timeline, and limit the number of variables and dependencies for transitioning on-premises applications to the cloud. Throughout the project, build momentum with key constituents with regular meetings to review progress and status of the migration project to keep people enthused, while also setting realistic expectations about the availability time frame.

Learn more about what it takes to migrate to the cloud in this guide here.