AWS Public Sector Blog
Tag: Amazon RDS
Combating illicit activity by tracking flight data via the cloud
Many organizations including the intelligence community, security organizations, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, news organizations, and non-governmental organizations work together to disrupt transnational crime networks. Their missions include combating illicit trade; disrupting human, animal, and narcotics trafficking; detecting money laundering; and exposing political corruption. This community needs rapid analysis of large, diverse streams of information about air transportation networks, because air transportation is the fastest way to conduct illicit trade internationally. The nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) built the Icarus Flights application to meet this need. By building on AWS using managed cloud services, C4ADS spends less time and energy managing infrastructure, which frees them to focus on building innovative analytics and alerting services that their user community needs.
Building innovative solutions to help nonprofits with fundraising, content delivery, and mission delivery
Nonprofits and cultural institutions need support to serve and deliver impact to our local and global communities. Amazon’s Raise-up Buildathon, presented by AWS, empowered developers, technology enthusiasts, and advocates to build cloud solutions that enhance digital capabilities to help with fundraising, content delivery, and mission delivery. The majority of the winning solutions are available to nonprofits and cultural institutions via open source. Learn more about what these solutions can do, from donor management to augmented reality, to improving how you reach out to constituents to expand your donation stream.
Using AWS for on-premises WordPress site continuity
Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.
UAE Mars mission uses AWS to advance scientific discoveries
On February 9, a new object successfully began to orbit Mars: an uncrewed spacecraft called the Hope Probe. The mission has already returned the first image of Mars, taken by Hope’s Emirates eXploration Imager from an altitude of 24,700 km. Led by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), the Hope Probe is the first interplanetary mission for the United Arab Emirates, the fifth country in history to reach the red planet. It will also be the first spacecraft to capture a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers during different times of the day and different seasons for one complete Martian year. Once data transmitted by the Hope Probe reaches the scientific teams on Earth, MBRSC will use AWS advanced technologies to process and analyze the vast amounts of data and imagery to help researchers better understand the Martian atmosphere and its layers.
Empowering adults and children to make the internet a safer place
Every year, Safer Internet Day brings together schools, teachers, parents, caregivers, and organisations around the world to promote a safer internet and the responsible use of online technology and mobile phones. This year on Tuesday, February 9, Safer Internet Day marks their 18th year, this year focusing on the topic, “An internet we trust: Exploring reliability in the online world.”
EdTechs evolve college admissions and testing processes for students
AWS EdStart Members—Clément Régnier, co-founder and CEO of TestWe in France, and Ruchir Arora, founder and CEO of CollegeDekho in India—are simplifying and reducing the exam and college admissions process for students. TestWe creates a secure, offline, and comfortable exam experience for students. CollegeDekho acts as the liaison between colleges and students, connecting students with an array of services through the college admission process. Read on to learn how these founders are developing the next generation of education solutions.
AlayaCare reimagines in-home and virtual care with AWS
AlayaCare, a Canada-based health technology organization founded in 2014, offers a platform for home and community care organizations. The cloud-based platform provides an end-to-end solution for care providers, including back office functionality, client and family portals, remote patient monitoring, and mobile care worker functionality. AlayaCare aims to help care providers by arming them with the technology and data insights they need to deliver personalized care. Using AWS, AlayaCare is building their vision of the future of in-home and virtual care.
A pragmatic approach to RPO zero
Nobody wants to lose data—and setting a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to zero makes this intent clear. Customers with government mission-critical systems often need to meet this requirement, since any amount of data loss will cause harm. RPO covers both resilience and disaster recovery—everything from the loss of an individual physical disk to an entire data center. Existing systems support RPO zero through a combination of architecture patterns (including resilient messaging) and on-premises legacy databases. Frequently interpreted as a database or storage requirement, providing for RPO zero requires thinking about the entire system. To do so, you can use AWS services and architecture patterns, which provide resilience to failure with clustering, auto scaling, and failover across multiple data centers within one region.
EdTech startups are making education more affordable and accessible to students at scale
AWS EdStart Members and founders—Tan Han Sing, founder of Tueetor, and Sanjay Srivastava, founder of Vocareum—are making educational resources more accessible to students at scale. Han Sing is focused on affordably connecting learners from all backgrounds with trainers, while Sanjay is focused on closing the global digital skills gap by providing turnkey virtual labs for higher education, tech training, demo, and assessment.
Digital transformation in higher education: Three benefits of ERP migration to the cloud
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems handle everything from accounting to marketing, finances to inventory, human resources to customer relations, and more. Colleges and universities commit significant infrastructure and personnel resources to run and manage these vital applications. But shifts in technology adoption, reduced availability of skilled labor, and increased economic pressures push colleges and universities to assess the return on their material ERP system investments. One way higher education institutions realize additional return on their scarce resources is by using cloud technologies. After Arizona State University (ASU) moved to AWS, the university was able to effectively allocate resources to benefit its students and solve operational problems that would otherwise require additional investment. Check out three benefits higher education institutions can recognize by moving ERP systems to the cloud.