AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

From minor regulatory adjustments to landmark reforms, state and local Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies are constantly adapting to changing requirements to provide vital benefits for the citizens they serve.

Policy changes or initiatives to improve social and clinical outcomes often require a modernization of systems to manage eligibility determination, benefits enrollment, claims adjudication, and other mission-critical processes. Building these systems in the cloud affords organizations increased speed, agility, flexibility, and cost savings that frees up budget to support innovation.

So while perspectives on the best path to an optimized healthcare system may vary, there are important trends to consider as agencies continue to work to deliver a more personalized and digital experience for their citizens.

Important healthcare solutions may lie in disparate datasets.

At the core of these health-policy initiatives is data pulled from countless systems and organizations. Agencies that are able to unlock this data to share within and across organizations realize the most efficient use of resources. Big data and analytics allow HHS agencies to become increasingly collaborative and to generate insights that will identify trends in utilization, quality metrics, and incidents of redundancy. For example, American Heart Association’s Precision Medicine Platform will include a vast array of curated datasets that are centrally stored, easily searched and accessible, and managed on the AWS Cloud. The platform enables researchers and clinicians to aggregate and analyze a rich breadth and depth of data and, in turn, allow researchers to uncover critical cardiovascular disease insights that translate into medical innovations and positively impact millions of lives.

One size does not fit all.

From prenatal disease screening to targeted cancer treatments, precision medicine has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by changing the roles of providers, patients, and payers. Rather than focusing primarily on treating chronic diseases, the unique genetic makeup of each individual will allow for personalized medicine.

Americans are getting older.

The size of our senior population is growing at a faster rate than ever before. Every day, ten thousand Americans celebrate their 65th birthday, and most of them are managing multiple chronic health conditions. While this pace is expected to continue into 2019 and beyond, the pool of healthcare providers is not expanding nearly as quickly. The role of technology will continue to increase as it is leveraged to facilitate care remotely, mitigate impacts of the healthcare provider shortage, and empower our older citizens to live independently in their homes and communities. Once again, agencies who are able to access and analyze datasets in the cloud gather invaluable intelligence on where their resources are most effectively applied.

To be prepared for the uncertainty of changing healthcare laws and regulations, health and human services programs at every level of government will continue to need modern and adaptable technologies to deliver effective services to citizens.

The AWS Cloud works with HHS agencies to provide the flexibility and agility to remain futureproof. Learn more about AWS for Health and Human Services here.

As we all try to keep focused on our New Year’s Resolutions, here’s some inspiration from some of the nonprofits who use the AWS Cloud for social good. These organizations focus their efforts year-round for the betterment of people around the world.

Whether they fight for the environment, work to achieve medical breakthroughs, preserve the arts, or focus on building social good, AWS can help organizations pay for only the technology they use, freeing up IT spend to grow their capabilities for the long term. When an IT burden is lifted through AWS, the nonprofit organization is able to put their time and effort to make the world a better place.

The four mission-driven organizations highlighted in this first entry in a series focus on helping global citizens, while we focus on supporting their IT.

Thorn – Digital Defenders of Children Dedicated to Driving Technology Innovation

Thorn’s mission is to drive technology innovation to fight human trafficking. They work to provide law enforcement with intelligence and leads about suspected human trafficking networks and individuals, with the ultimate goal of identifying victims and connecting them with resources. Spotlight, powered by Thorn and Digital Reasoning, processes and analyzes the data from 150,000 ads per day based on risk profiles provided by law enforcement. Since October 2014, they have analyzed 65 million ads and 400 million images in Spotlight. Over 3,200 law enforcement officers use Spotlight in all 50 states. They have also gone mobile. Daily Spotlight users report a 60% time savings in human trafficking investigations.

“AWS has been critical to our ability to deliver a world-class investigations tool that has helped officers across the country identify thousands of trafficking victims faster than ever before. We are grateful for this support that allows us to not worry about stability and storage – but instead focus our energy on constant improvement and innovation that helps stop trafficking and abuse,” said Julie Cordua, CEO, Thorn.

Check out the video and SlideShare presentation from Thorn’s session at re:Invent 2016.

Federation for Internet Alerts (FIA) – Leveraging the Internet to maximize the effectiveness of emergency alerts

FIA is a nonprofit organization that began in 2013 to distribute official child abduction alerts and tornado warnings across devices throughout the United States to those in the alerting area. FIA launched a working “Alert Hub” on the AWS Cloud in late 2015 in an effort to further standardize this practice and expand the availability of these alerts.  The reliability, speed, and reach of the Alert Hub is transforming the way vital information is spread through local communities.  The Alert Hub transmits free, life-critical emergency hazard information in under 200 milliseconds across the world to subscribers who can then use this data to disseminate emergency information to any affected area through use of Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). This free public service is always on, and has securely ingested, validated and distributed 720,000 official CAP alerts to subscribers.

“AWS is vital to FIA, providing cloud computing technology that aids in the transmission of official life-critical alerts,” says Jason Bier, FIA’s President.  “With the AWS Cloud, we are able to offer free subscriber access to the Alert Hub. We are encouraged by how many for-profit businesses and individual innovators are incorporating the Alert Hub into new and existing technologies to help save lives.”

Learn more here.

The World Bank Group – Working for a World Free of Poverty

The World Bank Group has set two goals for the world to achieve by 2030: end extreme poverty by decreasing the percentage of people living on less than $1.90 a day to no more than 3% and promote shared prosperity by fostering the income growth of the bottom 40% for every country.

In their work to eradicate extreme poverty, the World Bank Group needed modern technology and technology fit for purpose. They now use the AWS Cloud to disseminate information to their staff anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

“We have spent the last three and a half years executing on that plan. We have ripped out and upgraded almost every single application and platform in the Bank. We have completely changed the technology landscape,” said Stephanie von Friedeburg, Group Chief Information Officer and Vice President, Information and Technology Solutions, The World Bank Group.

Watch this video of Stephanie von Friedeburg talk about the organization’s cloud-first strategy and their transition to the cloud.

UNICEF – Imagine

UNICEF’s Imagine project brings together content from around the world as people upload videos of themselves singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” At our AWS Symposium in 2015, David Ohana, Chief of Brand, UNICEF, talked about running workloads in the cloud and enabling better services for UNICEF.

“To make sure that the world we imagine for children is heard loud and clear by key decision makers, the UNICEF Imagine team is hugely grateful to the AWS team for their continued support of this project. We chose AWS for the scalability, availability, and global reach. And as a result, we now we have some peace of mind that this idea may work,” said David.

Watch this video where David shares how UNICEF is reaching a global audience in a more agile and cost effective way.

Inspiring work from our nonprofits showing the intersection of technology and social good! Check back in with our upcoming posts where we will share more about how our customers use the cloud to achieve their missions, from saving the environment to achieving medical breakthroughs. And visit our “Nonprofits and NGOs in the Cloud” page here.

The AWS Research Initiative (ARI) brings Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) together to spur innovation in Big Data research. Under the program on Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) a total of $26.5 million will be funded by NSF and the Office of Financial Research (OFR) in addition to $3 million in AWS promotional credits for a period of 3-4 years.

The program seeks novel approaches in computer science, statistics, computational science, and mathematics, along with innovative applications in domain science, including social and behavioral sciences, education, biology, engineering, and the physical sciences that lead to the further development of interdisciplinary data science.

Under the ARI program, AWS and NSF will respectively support and collaborate on groundbreaking research from all qualified scientists, engineers, and educators. Now techniques and technologies like cloud-based Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data analytics, and High Performance Computing (HPC) will help researchers maximize the value of their NSF grants to accelerate the pace of innovation.

“BIGDATA research provides a paradigm shift by putting smart in everything we do today including smart home, smart city, smart cars, smart health, and more. We are excited to collaborate with the NSF to foster innovations in the field,” said Sanjay Padhi, Ph.D, AWS Representative to the NSF.

There are two categories of proposals:

• Foundations (F): those developing or studying fundamental theories, techniques, methodologies, and technologies of broad applicability to big data problems, motivated by specific data challenges and requirements.
• Innovative Applications (IA): those engaged in translational activities that employ new big data techniques, methodologies, and technologies to address and solve problems in specific application domains. Projects in this category must be collaborative, involving researchers from domain disciplines and one or more methodological disciplines (computer science, statistics, mathematics, simulation and modeling, and more).

The AWS Research Initiative with NSF provides up to $3M in AWS promotional credits over a period of up to four years, or for the duration of the initiative. AWS will offer many services through ARI grants, including compute and data services. NSF will be responsible for selecting grant awardees.

“In today’s era of data-driven science and engineering, we are pleased to work with the AWS Research Initiative via the NSF BIGDATA program to provide cloud resources for our Nation’s researchers to foster and accelerate discovery and innovation,”  said Dr. Jim Kurose, Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE).

To get started on your application, here are some cloud resources and tools for grant applicants:

• Big Data on AWS
• Artificial Intelligence on AWS
• Machine Learning on AWS
• Amazon Deep Learning (MXNET)
• High Performance Computing on AWS
• AWS Cloud Credits for Research
• AWS Research & Technical Computing Tools

To see how to apply, who qualifies, and more, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/research-and-technical-computing/nsf-aribd/

Learn more about the program here.

AWS was proud to help sponsor the 2016 Girls Who Code (GWC) Summer Immersion Programs for 1,500 high-school aged girls. To enable their work, AWS built a custom curriculum for the Girls Who Code teams to learn and build their projects in the cloud. At the conclusion of the seven-week program, students formed small teams and built web-based projects using the skills they gained during the summer.

A team of AWS experts reviewed the projects of the student teams who incorporated AWS into their projects. Two project teams were then selected to come to AWS re:Invent 2016 in Las Vegas. This provided students a chance to learn more about cloud computing, experience a large-scale tech conference, and share with other cloud enthusiasts their AWS-powered projects and passion for programming. The two selected projects were:

• The Mercer of Durham, Seattle Girls Who Code Summer Camp (2 students): The Mercer of Durham is a “choose-your-own-adventure” game played on the Amazon Echo through the cloud-based Alexa voice service. The purpose of the game is to play an adventure game through the power of your voice, similar to role playing. It was inspired by the text-based “choose-your-own-adventure-game” that the group created in class on Python.
• Kokua, Boston Girls Who Code Summer Camp (5 students): Kokua is a website that is used as a “cold caller” to select random students and as a random group generator to allow students the opportunity to work with different peers. In addition, the team created a bar graph displaying the statistics of how many times a student’s name was called. Kokua differs from traditional cold-calling devices because it organizes multiple functions into one tool that is easy for teachers to use. Coded using JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and CSS, Kokua saves teachers from worrying about who to call on next or keeping track of who is not participating.

“Attending AWS re:Invent gave us the opportunity to interact with world-class programmers and engineers and a chance to share our final project from Girls Who Code. Thank you AWS and GWC for sponsoring us!” shared the team from Kokua.

AWS is committed to helping build the pipeline of women and underrepresented communities in tech. As a part of this effort, we held a Diversify Tech panel at re:Invent. In the panel, experts in the field of diversity, equality, equity, inclusion, and innovation discussed actionable steps we can take, both individually and as companies, to improve diversity in tech. The Girls Who Code teams also presented their projects at the end of this panel, and received an opportunity to get to know Girls Who Code VP of Strategy and Innovation, Leah Gilliam, who moderated the discussion. You can watch the full panel here:

Amazon Web Services has a strong commitment to the needs of our customers across sectors in the UK. That’s the driving reason why we recently launched a new Region in the London area. Learn more about the new Region here.

Cities like London are quickly embracing innovation and developing new ways for engaging and serving citizens. From transportation to planning to utilities, cities are using cloud computing to transform the way they interact with citizens and think about their future. Both government and commercial organizations are using the cloud to provide information and deliver services to their customers and citizens. Learn more about the organizations you know that are already working to bring you smarter, more flexible services in and around London. Read more public sector case studies here.

AWS works with organisations around London to serve citizens more effectively and reach broader constituents. Learn more below:

• Helping Londoners heat their homes from anywhere – Hive (which runs on AWS) gives Londoners more control on how they heat their homes.
• Life in the cloud is always sunny – The Met Office looked to AWS when they wanted to deploy their weather and climate forecasting systems in the cloud, safely and efficiently.
• Keeping London moving takes more than trains and buses –  AWS and Transport for London work together to help Londoners better manage the daily commute.
• Helping Londoners on their path to university – Working together, UCAS and AWS are improving the university application experience.
• Introducing your smartphone to an even smarter bank – Monzo is building a new kind of bank, designed for your smartphone.
• If you are running a GIS on a CMS, AWS can help – Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency and AWS are finding novel ways to rapidly develop and deploy new services

Register now to get started on your digital journey to future government

When it comes to digital government projects, where do you get started? How do you train your staff and align your technology strategy with the ever-increasing pace of citizen requirements?

To answer these questions (and learn even more), join us the week of January 23rd  and week of March 6th, 2017 at the Urban Innovation Center, where AWS and Future Cities Catapult will offer discussions, roundtables, and workshops as part of the London Innovation Series. Customize your own itinerary and learn how to build citizen services in a new and fresh way. Learn more and register now.

Continue to learn about how AWS is helping Londoners every day here and check out the “Webminster” station in the photos below.

Also in London, AWS launched AWS re:Start, a training and job placement program for the UK to educate young adults as well as those leaving the Armed Forces, Reservists, Veterans, and their spouses on the latest software development and cloud computing technologies. Learn more here.

Two out of every five people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes and the number of new cancer cases will rise to 22 million globally within the next two decades, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). And as research organizations work to find a cure, the same technology behind improved voice assistants and credit card fraud detection—artificial intelligence—could also help improve cancer screening and save lives.

Through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, participants of the third annual Data Science Bowl, have the chance to improve lung cancer screening technology that can reduce lung cancer deaths by 20 percent.

The Data Science Bowl competition was created by Booz Allen Hamilton in partnership with Kaggle. Amazon Web Services is proud to sponsor the 2017 Data Science Bowl, which aims to inspire everyday citizens, data scientists, and medical communities around the world to work together and improve the success rate of low-dose CT scanning, using training and test datasets directly provided or facilitated through the National Cancer Institute.

This year, the 90-day Data Science Bowl competition will award winners with over $1 million in prizes, including AWS cloud computing credits. The funds for the prize purse will be provided by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. To learn more and participate in the Data Science Bowl, visit DataScienceBowl.com.

Last year’s Data Science Bowl was related to heart health. Learn more about it here.

AWS Public Datasets

Today, qualified researchers can access two of the world’s largest collections of cancer genome data as AWS Public Datasets:

• The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) corpus of raw and processed genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data from thousands of cancer patients is now freely available on Amazon S3 for registered users of the Cancer Genomics Cloud, one of the funded cancer cloud pilots of the National Cancer Institute.
• Over 2,400 whole genomes from 1,100 unique donors from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) dataset is also freely available on Amazon S3 for credentialed researchers, subject to the ICGC data sharing policies.

And, in order to help data scientists work with unique datasets, we built the AWS Research Cloud Program. The program was built by researchers, for researchers, in order to enable easy use of AWS resources by the scientific community around the globe. It’s free to join the program, and you can download the guide here to get started.

Key Resources for Researchers and Scientists

Additionally, below are some key resource links for researchers to help in the Data Science Bowl:

• Big Compute (HPC) on AWS (particularly C5, F1, Elastic GPUs)
• Artificial Intelligence on AWS
• Machine Learning on AWS
• AWS Research & Technical Computing Tools

How Does the Cloud Help Cure Cancer?

The cloud can fuel cancer breakthroughs at a rapid speed and we are looking forward to seeing what the participants of the Data Science Bowl are able to achieve using the cloud. For example, The Algorithms, Machines, and People (AMP) Lab at the University of California Berkeley builds scalable machine learning and data analysis technologies that turn raw data into actionable research insights, shared globally.

Among the many experiments run by the AMP Lab, one area of concentration is in the field of genomics and cancer research. Due to the vast amount of data that genome sequencing produces, the AMP Lab leverages AWS cloud-based compute power to quickly scale the compute resources needed to analyze algorithms that are used in genomics work. As a result, researchers are able to use many machines in the cloud simultaneously, to process genome data faster and more cost effectively than ever before.

Learn how more customers, like American Heart Association, National Institute of Health, and Harvard Medical School, use the AWS Cloud to revolutionize our understanding of disease and develop novel approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

Good luck to all participants!

Startups and small to midsized government agencies share many similarities – limited capital budgets, a pressure to meet deadlines and expectations, and a direct impact on people’s lives. With the AWS Cloud, startups like Lyft, Slack, and Thrive Market are able to be lean and agile and scale up and down quickly to respond to demand. If startups are able to use the cloud to minimize up-front capital costs, why shouldn’t any government agency—no matter the size?

With the successes startups have seen by building and scaling their services on AWS, government agencies too can bring the benefits of the cloud to citizens, while realizing numerous cost savings and efficiencies.

Invest in innovation, not infrastructure

Using the same model that startups use to maximize their initial capital, cities, counties, and localities are also turning to the cloud to solve some of the challenges facing governments today.

For example, the City of Asheville in North Carolina is no stranger to natural threats. Hurricane systems throughout the late summer and snowfall runoff in the spring leave the city under the constant threat of flooding. Hurricane Sandy led the city’s IT department to search for an offsite disaster recovery (DR) solution – a vital decision that had been put off due to the perceived cost and resource requirements of a cloud deployment.

The city used AWS to build an agile DR solution without the time, cost, and geographic risk of an on-premises data center. Without that capital expense, Asheville was able to reinvest resources toward continued testing of the DR system and expand functionality in asset management systems.

In addition to DR, governments have been turning to the cloud to lead public safety entities to cut down vital incident response time, to connect city transportation systems to operate at their most efficient, and to help build healthier communities with Health and Human Services.

Optimizing costs with AWS

One way that government differs from startups is that they have to adhere to strict annual budgets. With a devotion to making the most of taxpayer dollars, city, county, and local governments look to manage costs and still maintain the performance and capacity citizens require.

AWS allows these customers to control their spend by following a simple set of steps, such as:

1. Right-sizing services to meet capacity needs at the lowest cost
2. Saving when reserving instances for the year
3. Using the Spot Market
4. Monitoring and tracking service usage
5. Using Cost Explorer to optimize savings

Through variable cost structure, scalability, and cost optimization tools, AWS has saved its customers over $350 million, not including the coast avoidance in items such as real estate and energy that would be incurred in an on-premises data center.

To learn more about how your city, county, or local government can realize the benefits of the cloud, visit https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/.

Three new services within the AWS GovCloud (US) region have received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle, and PostgresSQL, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and AWS CloudTrail were assessed at the HIGH baseline and received the authorization.

“We are constantly listening to our customers and work to deliver more services to help accelerate their missions in the regions where they do business, and it is no different in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region,” said Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services. “We are thrilled to offer these three new services that meet the FedRAMP High baseline.”

Learn more about what new capabilities are available for U.S. government agencies to use to process their highly sensitive data, including Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), criminal justice information (CJI), and financial data in AWS GovCloud (US):

• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), MySQL, Oracle, Postgres: Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing agencies up to focus on their applications and mission.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs: U.S. government agencies can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and troubleshoot their systems and applications using their existing system, application, and custom log files. They can send their existing log files to CloudWatch Logs and monitor these logs in near real-time. CloudWatch Logs can be used to monitor logs for specific phrases, values, or patterns. For example, an agency could set an alarm on the number of errors that occur in their system logs or view graphs of web request latencies from their application logs.
• AWS CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail is a web service that records AWS API calls for accounts and delivers log files to the user. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

Read more in the AWS Security blog post here. And contact us today to get started in AWS GovCloud (US).

Cloud computing can support the Department of Defense (DoD) mission by increasing innovation, efficiency, agility, and resiliency— all while reducing costs.

Comprised of small, highly empowered teams, DoD’s United States Digital Service (USDS) is breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in highly regulated, unclassified environments.

Chris Lynch, Director of the Defense Digital Service, has been tasked with a push toward digital within the department. He recently spoke at AWS re:Invent about how DDS used the AWS Cloud to drive missions forward.

DDS encouraged the U.S. Air Force to use the cloud for testing. The program’s engineers needed regular and reliable test environments to more rapidly test software. The solution: build test environments in AWS GovCloud (US).

“We deployed our first ever national security system, or Impact Level 5, to AWS GovCloud (US). We are working on automatic builds and deployment. But the real impact is that when we are done, we are going to take something that took three weeks down to 15 minutes,” said Lynch.

The program has resulted in a cultural shift within the Air Force. Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves at re: Invent said the project has ignited a shift toward more oversight on the software development side of the acquisition process.

Watch the video of Chris Lynch at AWS re:Invent below.

The creation of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) shows progress toward Secretary Ash Carter’s goal to bring a culture of innovation in people, organizations, operations, and technology to the DoD. The DoD and the tech sector are working to support people who innovate, try new things, and iterate to recreate defense information technology.

In DefenseOne’s “Going Digital” event, Lynch spoke more about the work being done within the Defense Department and Intelligence Community to bring effective change through modernization efforts and harness promising technologies to tackle national security challenges.

Then, Steve Block, Senior Manager of Public Policy at Amazon, shared what the Department can do to better leverage the innovation happening in the commercial world today and what they can learn from industry experience as they continue to move toward a more modern IT environment.

Watch the viewcast here to learn more about how the DoD is modernizing defense in the cloud.

Two thousand sixteen saw global moments impacted by the cloud: presidential elections, treating virus outbreaks, and even handling traffic after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series! As the headlines took note of how these events impacted the lives of people across the globe, cloud computing was working behind the scenes to keep these technology services always on, accessible, and easy to use. Whether for downloading images of the surface of Mars or plotting out the best route to work, the AWS Cloud helped global governments, educational institutions, and nonprofits innovate to deliver better services to citizens and students.

Take a look back at 2016 and how the AWS Cloud powered innovations in policing, health, smart cities, education, and more.

Cloud-Powered Policing

Law enforcement agencies depend on AWS for solutions across the AWS Partner Network (APN) to connect their communities and improve public safety. These solutions provide first responders with real-time data, making often difficult situations as transparent as possible before police arrive on the scene.

For example, sensor technology alerts police officers when gunshots are detected providing complete visibility that improves officer safety in the field. Read more about the future of policing in these blogs.

Cloud-Powered Health

Public Health officials use the AWS Cloud to build healthier communities. The cloud aids initiatives, like monitoring air and water quality or epidemic management, with the data needed to protect citizens. Smaller, more citizen-engaged projects, like assisted living, elderly care, and wearable health devices, help medical personnel deliver the best care to their patients.

Learn more about cloud-enabled innovation in personalized medical treatment in this e-book.

Cloud-Powered Smart Cities

While a “smart city” can mean many things, what makes a city smart remains the same: data. In a mobile-driven world, AWS can help cities of all sizes gather, store, and distribute data in the AWS Cloud. Cities can then make data-driven decisions, modernizing programs that deliver measurable results for citizens.

For example, through open data and cloud technology, Transport for London (TfL) was able to deliver new services to the public, impacting the 24 million daily commuters using the Tube, buses, roads, trams, and freight, which has led to improvements in reliability, customer experience, and significant cost savings.

Cloud-Powered Education

The AWS Cloud impacts all corners of a campus and beyond. The cloud sparks education innovation by helping to reduce costs, improve service delivery, and increase student access to education. Explore the Campus on a Cloud map to learn how and where universities use the cloud every day.

AWS has over 7,000 education customers globally using the cloud to solve challenges, including: disaster preparedness, scaling web applications during peak loads like enrollment or graduation, supporting faster time to research results, creation of a cloud-ready next generation workforce with AWS Educate, and improved student outcomes and persistence through learning analytics and big data analysis.

Beginning their cloud journey by moving their web environment to AWS, University of Maryland, College Park focused on becoming a campus with no data centers. Watch this video to learn how the university uses Amazon WorkSpaces to give students and faculty access to software anytime, anywhere, from any device.

As we ring in 2017, we look forward to the innovations our customers will deliver in the New Year.

Check out more of our customer case studies here.