The National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, European Space Agency, NASA, Recovery.gov, State of Washington, Douglas County (NE), Multnomah County (OR), Harvard, MIT, University of California – Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Washington, and University of Oxford among the public sector organizations leveraging AWS to save money, drive research and development, and increase innovation globally
Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC that more than 300 government agencies and 1,500 education institutions are leveraging AWS for a wide range of uses including big data analytics, high performance computing, web and collaboration applications, archiving and storage, and disaster relief. AWS also announced today new services and features available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region (AWS GovCloud), including the addition of high performance computing capabilities. AWS GovCloud is a US-persons AWS region 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. To learn more about how public sector agencies are using AWS and the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, visit http://aws.amazon.com/publicsector/.
"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. "In addition, with initiatives such as the US Federal Cloud First mandate and the European Cloud Partnership, organizations are looking for ways to quickly move new and existing business and mission workloads to the cloud in a secure, compliant and cost-effective manner. With the new services and features added today in AWS GovCloud, public sector customers now have greater capabilities to rapidly design, build and deploy high performance applications with AWS's scalable, secure, low-cost platform."
Government agency adoption
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. Hundreds of agencies are leveraging AWS today, including The National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The US Recovery and Accountability Board, The US Department of the Treasury, US Department of State, US Department of Agriculture, The European Space Agency, NASA, State of Washington, Douglas County (NE) and Multnomah County (OR).
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. "BioSense is the first Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) program hosted completely in the cloud, in alignment with the White House cloud initiative. 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 has been 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. "AWS GovCloud meets the regulatory requirements of our federal customers, enabling Aquilent to more effectively move them into the cloud where they benefit from AWS's vast experience and past performance from the AWS commercial regions."
AWS GovCloud now includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute instances, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudWatch alarms. To learn more about AWS GovCloud, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/.
Growth of AWS in Education Institutions
Education institutions such as public and private universities, community colleges and K-12 schools and districts are quickly moving to the cloud so educators and researchers can advance classroom curriculum, teaching methods and research without the limitation of funding expensive hardware. Today, more than 1,500 education institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Georgetown University, New York University, California Institute of Technology, University of California – Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maryland, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, University of Washington, University of Oxford, and the University of Melbourne 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.
The M.S. in Analytics at the University of San Francisco provides students with the skills necessary to develop techniques and processes for data-driven decision-making. "We've integrated AWS into the curriculum for our Masters in Analytics program so we can give students real-world experience computing and analyzing large quantities of data," said Terence Parr, Director of the Analytics Graduate Program, University of San Francisco. "The majority of students are used to running simulated analytics on their laptops, but that's not the way it's done in business today. By using AWS, each student gains access to the compute resources they need to solve large-scale problems just as they would in their future careers, without our organization having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on supercomputer-strength hardware."
"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. "At Berkeley's AMP Lab, we are creating new data analytics software for Big Data applications. We measure and validate our software on real world problems like cancer genomics, traffic prediction and environmental monitoring. We have accelerated our research by using AWS to reconfigure the computational resources we need to fit the problem we're trying to solve at scale, rather than having to limit our research to our fit on our existing IT resources."
