Infotech Lead America: Amazon Web Services said more than 300 government agencies and 1,500 education institutions are leveraging AWS.
AWS customers’ uses include big data analytics, high performance computing, web and collaboration applications, archiving and storage, and disaster relief.
AWS also announced new services and features available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region (AWS GovCloud), including the addition of computing capabilities.
AWS GovCloud is designed to allow US government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements, such as ITAR.
“Government agencies and education institutions are rapidly accelerating their adoption of the AWS Cloud as organizations worldwide realize that they can be more innovative, agile and efficient by using the cloud for their technology infrastructure,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector, AWS.
Government agencies worldwide including federal, state and local governments are leveraging AWS to improve efficiencies, stay agile to the needs of citizens, and to meet mandates for data center consolidation and cost cutting.
For instance, CDC BioSense 2.0 is a public health monitoring service running in AWS GovCloud at the FISMA Moderate level that collects data from over 2,000 health facilities to help health officials respond to diseases quickly, identify trends, and save lives.
“Implementation of BioSense and public health surveillance practice in AWS GovCloud resulted in significant savings in overhead costs to CDC and state and local health jurisdictions. In turn, these savings can be used to support the creation of additional jobs at all levels for increased public health disease surveillance,” said Taha Kass-Hout, director, Division of Informatics Solutions and Operations at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Aquilent is working with AWS to provide solutions on top of AWS for government customers.
“AWS GovCloud has been instrumental to Aquilent because it fills a void for our customers in federal cloud computing who are having to do more with less,” said Mark Pietrasanta, CTO, Aquilent.
Education institutions such as public and private universities, community colleges and K-12 schools and districts are moving to the cloud.
More than 1,500 education institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Georgetown University, New York University and California Institute of Technology are leveraging AWS.
Additionally, AWS has supported grants of over $4 million to 350 universities in 35 countries through its education grants program, which allows educators, students and researchers to apply for AWS service credits to support their classroom projects.
Berkeley AMP Lab is a five-year collaborative effort at UC Berkeley, involving students, researchers and faculty from a wide swath of computer science and data-intensive application domains to address the Big Data analytics problem.
“We started using AWS because we knew it would completely change the way we could approach our research by enabling us to access scalable and affordable computing in a moment’s notice,” said Mike Franklin, director, UC Berkeley AMP Lab.
