AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

The implementation of highly scalable, easy-to-deploy technology is transforming the public sector, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Organizations begin their cloud adoption journeys in many ways. Some start with pilot projects and others jump into mission-critical programs, but they are all starting with an existing infrastructure. Adopting cloud doesn’t mean scrapping it all and starting over.

First, let’s define hybrid IT architecture. A hybrid IT architecture allows organizations to simplify the migration and management of applications by integrating on-premises environments with a commercial cloud. This means that a move to the cloud does not necessarily mean ripping everything out – it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Customers may choose to implement hybrid operations with AWS in order to be secure, scale, and take advantage of the breadth of services and the depth of features available in AWS.

At our 2016 AWS Public Sector Summit, we hosted a panel that explored how organizations are using cloud while building on their existing technology and lessons they’ve learned along the way. Check out some of the advice straight from our government customers, James Graham, Director Enterprise Content Management (ECM) & Enterprise Data Management (EDM), U.S. Department of Treasury and Dan Thomas, Chief Engineer, DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority, as well as key APN partners on how to begin your path to a hybrid IT architecture.

• Determine key drivers. For most organizations, you should determine what your key drivers are. Does cost matter most? Agility? Security? Speed? These drivers will decide what makes sense for your organization and whether you invest in physical hardware or make the decision to go to the cloud.
• Be pragmatic. Figure out what you want based on your key drivers. If speed is your goal, then pinpoint where you want to move fast and where you don’t need that speed. If you are operating on premises, it may make sense to continue running in your own data center for awhile, but if you want the self-service agility benefits of the cloud, then it may be time to start moving applications.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment. The cloud can give you the extra agility to experiment, even in a highly regulated industry. A hybrid approach allows you to make changes to interfaces and product offerings, and iterate more quickly. Cloud can give you the extra agility you may not have on premises.
• Look at capacity and capability. If you need to burst capacity, going to the cloud may be the best way to burst, especially if you have a seasonal or one-time demand. And when you have new requirements, you can see if that capability can come from the AWS Marketplace instead of requiring a home-grown application.

Watch more of our session videos from the AWS Public Sector Summit here. And watch the AWS Public Sector Summit Highlights video below.

If you are interested in simplifying the migration and management of applications by integrating your on-premises environments with the AWS Cloud, please visit our “Hybrid Cloud Architectures with AWS” page for more details.

And if you will be attending re:Invent, then make sure to check out the hybrid sessions below:

• Hybrid Architectures: Bridging the Gap to the Cloud
• Hybrid IT: A Stepping Stone to All-In

Technological innovation can often save lives or enable rapid intervention in situations where lives are threatened. From responding to gun shots  informing and mobilizing responders on school campuses, to fighting child trafficking, organizations have been able to move rapidly to address pressing societal problems.

The AWS Cloud has allowed teams to be agile and focus more on their missions rather than IT, giving them more time to focus on saving lives. Check out some of our customers who save lives with mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

ShotSpotter – Detect, Locate, and Alert on Gunfire in Under a Minute

ShotSpotter delivers real-time gunshot notifications to law enforcement so they can dispatch to the precise location of the gunshot, engage with the community, look for evidence and occasionally help victims and make arrests. Their goal is to help drive down illegal gun use.

The ShotSpotter solution is an excellent example of the AWS Cloud enabling next generation technology for the public safety community. ShotSpotter turned to AWS because they needed to cover a broad range of technologies, spanning sensor hardware design and embedded software development, classification of gunshots through machine learning, development of algorithms for precisely locating gunshots in a challenging acoustic environment, sensor network management, API development, and front-end technologies for delivering gunshot notifications and analysis.

Hear from Paul Ames, SVP, Products and Technology, at ShotSpotter alongside Kristin Boorse, Senior Product Manager, at Thorn at re:Invent 2016 in this session.

Thorn – Digital Defenders of Children Dedicated to Driving Technology Innovation

Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children is a nonprofit organization dedicated to driving technology innovation. Thorn maintains a vast global network of professionals on the front lines of this issue. They invest in research to better understand emerging trends. Then, they explore new strategies to identify victims, deter predators and disrupt platforms through the innovation lab, hackathons and partnerships. They try things that haven’t been done before, and will risk failure to achieve greater impact from success. When they identify a new approach that has impactful results, they will invest to scale that tool and put it in the hands of those who can deploy it across the country and internationally for broadest reach.

LiveSafe – Mission to Make the World a Safer Place through Crowdsourced Intelligence

LiveSafe, a mobile safety communications platform for crowdsourced intelligence, was born from a spirit of triumph over tragedy and the desire to make the world a safer place. After the mass shootings at Virginia Tech, the founding team saw an opportunity to mobilize and connect people through technology. LiveSafe is putting safety in everyone’s hands to prevent incidents and directly connect people to the help they need. Via the mobile safety app installed on individuals’ smartphones, every submission via text, photo or video is collected with location data to facilitate two-way communication between students and campus security and providing actionable responses from real-time information. Data can also be submitted anonymously, protecting an individual’s identity while still providing critical information to relevant officials.

When considering the technology needed to run mobile apps, LiveSafe looked for scalability, reliability, security, user engagement, and  low cost. Learn more about how the AWS Cloud helps them to scale rapidly during times of instances, like a security threat on campus or at a stadium in this past blog post.

Sri Elaprolu, Global Public Sector IoT Lead at AWS, will lead the “AWS Customers Saving Lives with Mobile and IoT Technology” session with Thorn and ShotSpotter at re:Invent. Sign up for this session here!

As enterprises seek to fully realize the scalability, availability, security and agility of cloud computing, many are recognizing that they must migrate core business applications, such as finance and human resource systems, rather than just public-facing websites.

For example, the University of Arizona addressed the challenge of creating a more efficient and agile IT operation. After initial success in migrating their Research Administration system, they became the first major university to migrate their PeopleSoft application environments to AWS.

With re:Invent a week away, there is still space available to hear directly from the University of Arizona about their enterprise migration roadmap, lessons learned, plans and budgets, and the tools available to support major enterprise migrations. Save your seat in that session here.

Many organizations, like the University of Arizona, are extending or moving their business applications to AWS to simplify infrastructure management, deploy more quickly, provide greater availability, increase agility, allow for faster innovation, and reduce cost. Having a clear understanding of existing infrastructure costs, the components of the migration bubble and corresponding costs, and projected savings will help enterprises calculate payback time and projected ROI.

With a long history in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing, AWS delivers a set of services specifically designed for the unique security, compliance, privacy, and governance requirements of large organizations.

Focus on the needs of your enterprise, not your infrastructure. Learn how to create a roadmap to cloud computing, transform application development, deploy mission-critical workloads at scale, and retrain staff. Attend the re:Invent session featuring the Deputy Chief Information Officer and the Director of Enterprise Technical Services at the University of Arizona. And download A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration here.

In the social service and public health sectors, providers rely on data collected by many different institutions to provide the best care to their clients.  But data management and analysis can cause challenges for the social service and public health sectors.

In order to take an integrated approach, case workers must have the capacity to share and access vital information about the client, not only within their own agency but also with partner agencies involved in the client’s care. The challenge has been that each agency traditionally uses its own system of data collection, and these systems are not designed for cross-collaboration. Furthermore, U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and other mandates require that sensitive data must be managed securely and in compliance with the law.

VerticalChange, an APN partner, recognized a need for more flexible, affordable, and easy-to-use tools for data collection and reporting. VerticalChange provides a range of security features including SSL encryption for all communication within the application, as well as role-based permissions and logging related to access of all client data. These and other features enable organizations to maintain compliance with relevant security privacy regulations including HIPAA.

VerticalChange uses the cloud to provide access to your data wherever you are, quickly and securely. The application can scale to meet your needs whether you have 5 or 5000 users, and the utility pricing of the cloud allows them to provide a cost effective pay-as-you-go service with full support.

“Previously, service providers and case workers have been limited to an offering of niche products that lack sophistication and flexibility. But because VerticalChange runs on AWS and is distinctively agile, we were able to provide continuous live deployment in a robust architecture that is constantly improving. And we are able to do this across a range of service domains. This has all been possible because of AWS,” said Jonathan Humfrey, CEO of VerticalChange.

Connected Data: The County of Santa Barbara, CA

For example, in early childhood education, data is often fragmented and does not connect across systems. The County of Santa Barbara uses VerticalChange to collect, manage, and share critical programmatic data for its Early Childhood Education initiatives with its 20+ nonprofit and government agency partners. As systems connect with school districts and other providers, they can determine if kids who had access to certain services are on a trajectory to do better in specific areas, such as third grade reading and math scores. The Santa Barbara Foundation and a number of other foundations have supported research and development related to the project through grants to nonprofit partners.

Based on the success of the first proof of concept, VerticalChange iterated on this idea and the latest solution now:

• has import/export functionality;
• can be integrated across different systems;
• can bring data from multiple systems into a single VerticalChange account where it can be combined with other data;
• And, another component allows for the integration by API with an assessment tool for mental health.

VerticalChange has evolved into a powerful tool for programs and initiatives that include multiple service providing agencies. Learning from the lessons of the County of Santa Barbara, the Research Department at Child Care Resource Center is now using VerticalChange for projects in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and Riverside counties, including two federally funded demonstration projects.

VerticalChange is able to help its clients manage and utilize their data more effectively, giving them time back to spend helping people.

Learn how to use AWS to meet requirements for HIPAA, FERPA, and CJIS in this presentation here.

Attending AWS re:Invent 2016? Don’t miss the “Using AWS to Meet Requirements for Education, Healthcare and Public Safety (HIPAA, FERPA, and CJIS)” session during the Public Sector Pre-Day on Monday, November 28, 2016.

Our customers around the world are both “thinking big” and “going big” – driving transformative change through the cloud. Before the cloud, government agencies spent a lot of time and resources managing their own data centers and co-location facilities, which meant time they were not spending on their core organizational missions. With the cloud, organizations, such as government agencies can function more like startups that move at the speed of ideas.

We believe in innovating on behalf of our customers and we see the cloud as a true mission enabler. And innovation can help private and public sector organizations stay ahead of cyber threats.

At CyCon, The International Conference on Cyber Conflict, Teresa Carlson, VP of AWS Worldwide Public Sector, shared three things that we can do together to improve cybersecurity:

1. Policy – The public and private sectors need to work collaboratively to ensure that the right policies are in place to enable business in the cloud.
2. Security – Let’s work together to ensure that we have all of the leading compliance standards and security processes in place to build a more secure world.
3. Education – Let’s commit to creating the right environment for mentorship, both at the individual level and business-to-business. Together, we can bring the right tools, technology, and training to close the cyber skills gap.

In the past, organizations had to choose between moving fast OR staying secure. With the cloud, it’s possible to move fast AND stay secure. Below are examples of how governments – both local and federal – use the cloud to continue to innovate quickly, while staying secure.

Innovation in the City

Let’s take one of our City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge winners – the City of Los Angeles.

The City of Los Angeles is one of the largest targets for cyber attacks in the nation. Due to the size of the city’s operations — 35,000 employees distributed across 37 different departments — on an average day, the city records more than 130 million security messages from more than 120,000 connected devices.

The city needed a better way to ingest this data, process it, and identify security events to better monitor potential security incidents and coordinate their incident response teams. To do this, the City of Los Angeles leveraged the AWS Cloud to provide storage and compute power for its custom-developed security information and event management (SIEM) system, which supports their integrated Security Operations Center (SOC).

As a result, the five cybersecurity teams that support the entire city have been able to more effectively manage their security operations and process security events across departments faster, resulting in faster response times.

Partnership in Cyber

Protecting U.S. cyber assets has become a top-level priority for government and the private sector – and through that, we are seeing new partnerships emerge. The Department of Defense (DoD) has been fighting adversaries who have harnessed technology to attack the U.S. To defend the DoD’s information networks, cyber analysts must comb through the vast, unstructured volume of DoD cyber defense data to detect, assess, and mitigate cyber threats and act quickly.

To support this mission, APN partner, Enlighten IT Consulting, developed and deployed the Big Data Platform (BDP) for one of their DoD customers. The platform, which runs in the AWS Cloud, is used by mission partners across the DoD. The BDP is a robust and scalable architecture capable of ingesting, storing, and visualizing multiple petabytes of cyber data. Its distributed data structures and streaming ingest capabilities provide storage and retrieval rates in the millions of records per second. EITC also developed and deployed a suite of cyber situational awareness analytics to the BDP, giving analysts tools for accelerated attack detection, diagnosis, and threat mitigation. When hosted in our AWS GovCloud region, the components of the BDP and the cloud mesh to create a secure platform accredited for use across the DoD.

Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. Learn how, as an AWS customer, you will benefit from a modern cloud computing architecture built to meet the security requirements of the world’s most security-sensitive organizations.

How do we accelerate progress in federal IT and maintain the velocity that we currently have? That was the main question asked during a lively conversation at the recent FedTalks in Washington, D.C.

Just over a month after the White House appointed its first U.S. chief information security officer (CISO), Greg Touhill, cybersecurity took center stage at FedTalks. During the FedTalks Cybersecurity Chat, Steve Schmidt, VP & CISO at AWS, sat down with Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-Va), John Edwards, CIO of the CIA, and Luke McCormack, CIO of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to gather insights into how agencies can improve cybersecurity and create an actionable cyber strategy during a transition of power within the U.S. federal government.

With the focus on the future, the panelists shared what has worked for them and how cloud computing strategies will continue to contribute to a strong cybersecurity posture.

Watch the video of the full panel discussion to learn how agencies can use the cloud safely, securely, and at a lower cost to protect vital information.

A collaborative approach of sharing cybersecurity best practices between the public and private sectors raises the security protection bar to better defend against evolving cyber threats. We listen to our customers and innovate to deliver on the speed, agility, flexibility, and security they need. Amazon looks forward to continued collaboration with agencies.

Attending re:Invent? Make sure you reserve your seat in our public sector sessions here.

Today and every day, we are grateful to the men and women who serve our country in the military. We are constantly looking for ways to engage the military community – through our hiring initiatives, partnerships to strengthen the skills of transitioning service members, and our community engagement efforts.

We have had the opportunity to work with and for veterans and the military community in a number of different ways, including:

Cyber Vets Virginia: Cyber Vets Virginia is a new initiative to provide veterans with access to cyber security training opportunities and resources to help veterans enter the Virginia cyber security workforce.  AWS is collaborating with the Commonwealth of Virginia and other private sector contributors to offer access to our existing web based training program around security fundamentals to transitioning service members and recent veterans who have foundational IT skills, and want to pursue a career in cyber security. For additional information on the Cyber Vets Virginia initiative, please visit: http://cybervets.virginia.gov/

Joining Forces: Amazon pledged to offer 10,000 service members, transitioning veterans, and military spouses over $7m in Amazon Web Services (AWS) trainings. Amazon is also committed to training 25 wounded warriors at AWS Boot Camps for functional roles in cloud computing and commercial companies operating in the tech space and hiring 25,000 veterans and military spouses over the next five years. Learn more in the Amazon blog here.

AWS Educate for Veterans: As part of our Joining Forces pledge, we recently committed to training 10,000 veterans and military family members in cloud computing through AWS Educate. U.S. based veterans and their families are eligible to create an AWS Educate account, which gives them access to resources that can accelerate cloud-related learning endeavors to help power civilian career success. Get started today by visiting: www.awseducate.com/veterans

AWS Military Fellowship: We created the AWS Military Fellowship exchange program as part of the larger program across the Department of Defense (DoD), designed to expose active duty military to AWS’s technology and Amazon’s leadership principles. The programs build a unique cadre of officers who understand not only the profession of arms, but also the nature of the strategic problems facing the DoD, and the organizational and operational opportunities made possible by revolutionary changes in information and other technologies. Read the stories from our three fellows featuring Lieutenant Colonel (Promote-able) Maria Schneider (MS), U.S. Army Acquisition Officer, James Thomas (JT), U.S. Airforce Communications Officer, and Master Sergeant Kelly Butler (KB), U.S Army Acquisition Non-Commissioned Officer.

AWS Certification Exam Reimbursement for Veterans: 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.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs:  From action to impact, the cloud allows the VA to create an environment for veterans that is more applicable to their needs, while meeting security requirements. “The fact is innovation and technology has allowed us to dream and innovate like nothing else in our lifetime,” said LaVerne H. Council, Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology and Chief Information Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs. “And so as we think about embracing new solutions, collaborating and engaging, we need to think about the people… we need to think about how a vet can receive the data and the information the way he/she needs, to enable the best healthcare they can get.” Watch the video of LaVerne Council speaking at the recent AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC, sharing how she is acting as a change agent within the VA, taking the agency from vision to reinvention to adoption to change.

To all veterans, thank you for your service!

Last May, Amazon pledged to offer 10,000 service members, transitioning military personnel, and military spouses free membership to AWS Educate as part of Joining Forces, the initiative that works hand in hand with the public and private sectors to ensure that service members, veterans, and their families have the tools they need to succeed throughout their lives. AWS Educate helps individuals learn the skills needed for in-demand cloud computing jobs through AWS service credits, online career pathways, provision of micro-credentials, and the AWS Educate Job Board.

Starting today, U.S. based veterans, transitioning military personnel, and their families are eligible to create an AWS Educate account to get access to the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning endeavors to help power civilian career success.  From the frontline to the classroom, AWS is committed to prepping the next generation of IT and cloud professionals.

With the recent launch of several new features in our AWS Educate program, including Cloud Career Pathways, AWS Educate Badges, and the AWS Educate Job Board, verified service members can begin their cloud career journey.

AWS Educate’s self-paced course modules are designed to build core skillsets across four job families that align to the AWS Educate Job Board, including: Cloud Architect, Software Developer, Operations-Support Engineer, Analytics and Big Data Specialist. Within these four job families are over 25 cloud career pathways, ranging from Cloud Support Associate to Associate Cloud Architect to Software Developer.

Thank you to all active and retired military members for your service. We look forward to working with you on your pathway into the cloud!

To be eligible for AWS Educate, military status will be verified by SheerID. Get started today by visiting: www.awseducate.com/veterans

Are you getting out to vote today? At AWS, we have supported election and voting-related projects with cloud computing services to scale for the influx of traffic these websites receive during the election period.  If you register to vote, donate to a candidate, look up information on where and how to vote, or carpool to the polls – you may be using the cloud.

With the eyes of the nation focused on the election, the organizations listed below (among others) use AWS for inexpensive and highly scalable infrastructure to build websites, host core systems, and manage outreach and fundraising.

Get out there and vote – and read how these organizations use the cloud to quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively meet their mission.

Pew Charitable Trusts Voting Information Project – The Voting Information Project (VIP) works with states to provide official information to voters about where to vote and what’s on their ballots. VIP uses an open format to make election data available and accessible, bringing cutting edge technology to ensure that all eligible Americans have the information they need to cast a ballot.

Rhode Island’s Voter Information Center – The Voter Information Center (VIC) handles requests for information such as polling place look-up, sample ballots, elected officials, overseas voter information, as well as many similar functions related to elections. The purpose of this project is to make our VIC highly available during periods of extremely high traffic, such as weeks leading up to and including Election Day.

The League of Women Voters – Since 1920, the nonpartisan political organization, League of Women Voters (LWV), has sought to improve US systems of government and impact public policies through education and advocacy. The LWV Education Fund (LWVEF) runs the website VOTE411.org, which provides nonpartisan election information to the public. As a website devoted to elections, VOTE411.org experiences surges in volume over the period leading up to Election Day during federal election years. The rest of the time, VOTE411.org has a relatively low volume of traffic. The hosting solution needed to serve as many as half a million unique visitors on Election Day, and then scale down after the polls closed. “The choice to move to the cloud was clear,” says Jeanette Senecal, Senior Director, LWVEF. “AWS was exactly what we needed: a hosting solution that scaled seamlessly,” Senecal says. Learn more about how the League of Women Voters uses the AWS Cloud here.

National Democratic Institute –  The National Democratic Institute (NDI), which works to ensure free and fair elections and strengthen democratic institutions worldwide, needed a flexible IT infrastructure that was secure and low-cost. By moving to AWS and scaling infrastructure appropriately, the organization reduced costs by 90% and improved security by using AWS security groups and features. Watch the video about how they leverage the AWS Cloud here.

Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Foundation’s TrustTheVote™ Project – OSET 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 chose to make its software available on AWS GovCloud (US), because it offers the security and compliance for sensitive data, while offering the scalability, agility, and cost savings of the cloud. And it can be quickly and easily delivered anywhere in the country. Cloud-based voter registration, ballot design, and election results reporting are ideal starting points to lowering costs and improving the public trust in our democracy.

Rock the Vote – Rock the Vote, one of the largest nonprofit and nonpartisan organizations in the United States driving the youth vote to the polls, hosts their registration platform and services on the AWS Cloud. Rock the Vote’s voter registration platform is a free, open source solution that makes voter registration easier for voters and partner organizations across the country. Moving Rock the Vote’s platform to the AWS Cloud allowed for increased scalability for an increasingly mobile society, with the same robust service and approach to security AWS delivers to all commercial and government customers worldwide. “Cloud technology combined with open data, open standards, and open source development can be a game-changer in election administration,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services. “Leveraging the AWS Cloud’s highly scalable and secure infrastructure will help enable Rock the Vote to raise the bar on innovative voter registration services.”

Democratic National Committee –  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) assists local, state, and federal Democratic candidates. The organization moved from a traditional IT infrastructure to AWS to run its website and to gather, store, and deliver voter data to other political organizations. By using AWS, the DNC reduced its IT footprint, cut costs, and enabled scaling for its website to easily handle spikes in traffic. Watch this video on how the DNC runs its website and voter data collection on AWS here.

And as we say goodbye to President Barack Obama, read how the cloud helped the Obama for America 2012 campaign in this video.

While we wait to hear who will be the next president of the United States, continue to learn how AWS handles the heavy lifting of IT so organizations can focus their time and resources on their mission.

With the countdown to the election in full force, modern politics has combined with technology to help shape the social landscape with Carpool2Vote. The non-partisan app seeks to empower women voters and increase voter turnout by connecting voters needing a ride to the polls.

What started as an experiential learning project for Nicole Wild Merl and her mentor, Thomas Cook, through Northeastern’s first virtual Education Cooperative, has now grown into a community of activists sharing their voices and providing free rides to the polls through their app. Carpool2Vote is a digital platform of WomenVotes, a blog and social platform.

“To develop the platform, we had to do research and decide on the technology that could help create something from passion to scale. Given the nature of elections, and considering that we are a nonprofit with two of us on staff, we needed something that was fast, scalable, and secure. And for our end users, we needed something that was reliable and easy to use,” said Nicole, co-founder of WomenVotes and Carpool2Vote.

WomenVotes used the AWS Cloud to combine educational studies with a political purpose in order build and iterate on their Carpool2Vote app in time for the elections. By running their app on the AWS Cloud, Nicole and Thomas were able to take the heavy lifting out of building their infrastructure so they could focus on what matters most to them – getting voters to the polls on election day.

“We wanted to develop an app that provided free rides so there was no excuse for anyone not to get out and have their voice heard in the elections. We joined together and believed in a cause. As individuals, we know that technology levels the playing field and allows us to make a difference,” Thomas said.

Carpool2Vote has the power to make an impact. Carpool2Vote is bringing people to the polls who may not have had the access or opportunity to get to their polling location on their own. It is also encouraging and building a community by allowing volunteers who are passionate about voting to help those who may need extra encouragement to get there. If they reach their goal of ten thousand users during this election period, then that is ten thousand users who may not have voted. Since launching Carpool2Vote and WomenVotes.org early this year, Nicole and Thomas have been joined by a community of collaborators that include government representatives, women’s networking associations, and media companies. Using the AWS Cloud, WomenVotes was able to build Carpool2Vote in time for the general election, and will continue to grow using the cloud.

“With WomenVotes being a grassroots organization, Amazon Web Services allows us to grow as an organization, advance our mission, and reinvent how we look at the future,” said Nicole.

Follow along at #WomenVotes. And you can download Carpool2Vote for free in the App store and for Androids here.

Learn how to use Carpool2Vote in this video below.