AWS Public Sector Blog
Tag: technical how-to
Using AWS CDK to build an extensible file-scanning solution for Amazon S3 buckets
In today’s digital world, ensuring the security of information is essential. One common scenario where data security is crucial is when files from external sources are received by an organization. While Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides robust security features like the default encryption of all uploaded files, there are scenarios where it’s important to ensure that the incoming files are free from any kind of malware, such as viruses, before they are processed or stored inside the organization. Read this post to learn more.
Simplify firewall deployments using centralized inspection architecture with Gateway Load Balancer
As government organizations transition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), they often seek to maintain operational continuity by using their existing on-premises firewall solutions. Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) enables seamless integration of these firewall appliances into the AWS architecture, ensuring consistent security policies and minimizing disruptions. This post explores best practices for implementing GWLB to facilitate centralized traffic inspection for both east-west and north-south traffic flows.
Battling the food security crisis with Agents for Amazon Bedrock
The 2024 version of the United Nations (UN) annual report “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” found that about 29.6 percent of the global population, or about 2.4 billion people, were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022, meaning they did not have adequate access to food. Food security can be caused by a number of factors, including poverty, inflationary factors, violent conflict, and the effects of climate change. In this post, we demonstrate how generative artificial intelligence (AI) can help organizations better understand the food security crisis.
Using ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine on Amazon EMR to predict rideshare demand
Rideshare demand prediction is a well-explored topic in academia and industry, with abundant online resources offering diverse modeling frameworks tailored to different geographic contexts. A challenge with rideshare demand prediction, however, is that the trip data required to calibrate or train models can be exceptionally large. In this post, we explore the challenges of big data analytics and showcase how ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine, a spatial analytics library for the Apache Spark environment, can be used on Amazon EMR to effectively address these problems.
How to use AWS Wickr to enable healthcare workers to interact with generative AI
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service with features designed to keep internal and external communications secure, private, and compliant. In this post, we present an architecture that uses the Wickr messaging solution for protected communication with a generative AI backend system, which uses an existing open source project: the AWS GenAI Chatbot. Read this post to learn more.
Improving constituent experience using AWS-powered generative AI chatbots
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the experience of state and local government constituents. With Amazon Lex, you can design and build sophisticated voice and text conversational interfaces, deploy omnichannel experiences with pre-built integrations to contact center solutions, and pay only for speech and text requests with no upfront costs or minimum fees. This post provides a technical walkthrough for building a generative AI chat-based solution.
Building a secure and low-code bioinformatics workbench on AWS HealthOmics
Singapore General Hospital (SGH), SingHealth Office of Academic Informatics (OAI), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated to develop a cost-effective, scalable cloud infrastructure that enables researchers to perform their own analyses on a centrally secured and compliant cloud platform. AWS HealthOmics offers a suite of services that help bioinformaticians, researchers, and scientists to store, query, analyze, and generate insights from genomic and other biological data. Read this post to learn more about the three primary components of HealthOmics used in the solution.
Mitigating inadvertent IPv6 prefix advertisement with AWS automation
As federal agencies migrate to the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 framework, they will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to exit to the internet, bypassing the TIC network. This transition requires agencies to plan and coordinate migration activities to verify seamless IPv6 connectivity. Agencies need to coordinate advertising their IPv6 prefixes with AWS, using mechanisms like Bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP). The migration process could involve changes in routing policies, firewall rules, and security controls to accommodate the IPv6 prefix changes. Read this post to learn more.
Safeguarding data exchange in government using AWS
When government agencies choose Amazon Web Service (AWS) to store data, they choose to take advantage of inheriting the strictest security controls and standards. In addition, AWS services offer a unique opportunity to enhance networking and security approaches, ensuring safe and resilient data transfer mechanisms. This blog post provides guidance towards data sharing among government agencies, offering prescriptive approaches and best practices for implementing secure data exchange solutions using AWS services.
Hydrating the Natural History Museum’s Planetary Knowledge Base with Amazon Neptune and Open Data on AWS
The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a world-class visitor attraction and a leading science research center. NHM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered up to transform and accelerate scientific research by bringing together a broad range of biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time. In an earlier post, we discussed NHM’s overall vision for using open data in combination with large-scale compute, data systems, and machine learning (ML) to create the Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB), a knowledge graph of global biodiversity. In this post, we focus on the underlying services and architecture that comprise the PKB.