Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

In January 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) inaugurated a Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The CIC uses emerging technologies to solve real-world problems and has produced more than 50 prototypes in sectors like healthcare, education, and research. The Centre’s work has involved 300-plus AWS accounts across various groups, including external collaborators, UBC staff, students, and researchers. This post discusses the management of AWS in higher education institutions, emphasizing governance to securely foster innovation without compromising security and detailing policies and responsibilities for managing AWS accounts across projects and research.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on students’ mental health and well-being. In fact, a staggering 87 percent of public schools reported that the pandemic had negatively impacted their students’ social-emotional development during the 2021–2022 school year. These effects have lingered long past the pandemic, and students’ social-emotional well-being remains a primary concern of administrators, teachers, and parents. To address this ongoing crisis, The Happy Sad Company was founded. Collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS), they strategically planned, scaled, and launched an app to help teachers, parents, and students gain a better understanding of how things are going.

On September 11, 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the Provincial and Municipal Cyber Grant Program across Canada at the AWS Summit in Toronto. To help provincial and municipal governments implement cloud-based cybersecurity solutions, AWS is investing $5 million CAD in AWS credits to new and existing AWS customers.

The­ Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo – powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and part of the AWS Cloud Innovation Centers (CIC) program – collaborated with the City of San Diego and the San Diego Cyber Center of Excellence (CCOE) to create ‘My eCISO,’ a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based application that propels public and private organizations on a path to cyber resiliency. This post explores the technology behind My eCISO and its implications for organizations looking to protect against attacks.

Credit unions play a crucial role in communities by providing a diverse range of financial services driven by their members’ needs. These services, supported by core banking applications, form the backbone of credit union operations. Traditionally, credit unions use legacy systems for their core banking applications, such as lending, payments, and deposits. But these systems are monolithic, expensive, and lack open architecture, impacting credit unions’ abilities to deploy changes based on market demands. In this digital age, cloud computing offers a transformative solution, and as we will explain in this post, Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands at the forefront.

This post addresses eight common misconceptions about cloud computing held by Canadian public sector organizations. It covers cloud security, cost savings, value beyond expenses, and cloud providers’ investments in Canada. The insights shared will equip public sector leaders to make informed decisions and leverage cloud computing’s potential.

As Australia moves forward with a national framework for the assurance of artificial intelligence (AI) in government, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is committed to helping our customers implement AI solutions that align with Australia’s AI Ethics Principles. This post outlines how AWS tools and services can support government agencies in adhering to Australia’s AI Ethics Principles when developing AI and machine learning (ML) solutions. The post includes a focus on implementation to help Australian governments responsibly innovate whilst maintaining cloud-based agility.

Despite a common misconception about government, state agencies regularly innovate on behalf of their constituents. In this post, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts share examples of innovation from New Mexico and North Carolina. We also provide tips for accelerating procurement and maintaining visibility over rapidly implemented workloads.

Many Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers in regulated environments such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) struggle to gain security approval to take advantage of the scaling of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) using its Auto Scaling capabilities. This is often attributed to configuration management, total asset inventory, compliance with agency third-party security tools, and agency authorization documentation. This post provides AWS recommended best practices for implementing EC2 Auto Scaling in DoD environments. 

The potential of open data to transform governance and public services is immense, but realizing this potential requires overcoming common obstacles. In this post, we will explore best practices and solutions for Canadian public sector organizations seeking to use the cloud for open data, specifically examining how Amazon Web Services (AWS) can enable open data success.