Category: Higher education

Academic research IT departments around the world face the same challenge: how to balance their existing on-premises infrastructure with the opportunities of cloud computing. At the Supercomputing 2024 (SC24) conference, Amazon Web Services hosted a panel featuring two research IT leaders: Circe Tsui, associate director of solutions architecture at Emory University in the Office of Information Technology, and Dr. Robert Shen, director of the RMIT AWS Supercomputing Hub (RACE) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). During the panel, Tsui and Shen shared how their institutions use AWS to augment and enhance their research operations with more scalability, security, and collaboration alongside their on-premises infrastructure. Read this post to learn more.

By 2026, more than 90 percent of organizations worldwide will face challenges related to an IT skills shortage. Artificial intelligence skills are among the most in-demand, but a variety of cloud skills like architecture, data management and storage, and software development are among the top 10 needed IT skills. To address these needs, Amazon Web Services hosts AWS State, Local, and Education Learning Days, a series of no-cost in-person events nationwide. These one-day events provide IT professionals and business executives in state and local government (SLG) and education with hands-on learning opportunities to grow their cloud skills. Read this post to learn more.

Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs and provide students with a clear path to degree completion. Data analytics can help these institutions proactively identify and support at-risk students, allowing them to develop personalized intervention strategies to improve student retention and graduation rates. In this post, we’ll explore how Amazon Redshift ML, a powerful machine learning (ML) capability within the Amazon Redshift data warehouse, can enable higher education leaders to quickly predict student outcomes and communicate insights to key stakeholders.

To remain viable and continue to fulfill their mission, educational institutions are constantly seeking ways to optimize their IT costs while maintaining high-quality services. One often overlooked area for potential savings is the management of cloud resources, particularly Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Many universities and colleges find themselves facing unexpected costs when EC2 instances are left running during off-peak hours or periods of inactivity. In this post, we explore how higher education customers can implement automatic shutdown mechanisms for EC2 instances, significantly reducing cloud expenses.

A new publication from Amazon Web Service (AWS) provides insights and case studies on using cloud technology to accelerate sustainability initiatives in the higher education sector. It showcases how AWS works closely with institutions to help them reach their sustainability goals.

EDUCAUSE and the Shared Assessments working group collaborated with Internet2 and REN-ISAC, to create the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT). EDUCAUSE is a non-profit association committed to advancing the use of technology and data in higher education. The HECVAT is a third-party, vendor questionnaire framework designed for higher education institutions to evaluate the security and privacy posture of cloud and technology providers. It is intended to centralize vendor security and compliance information for ease of use. Amazon Web Services (AWS) now offers both the HECVAT Lite version and Full version to customers on-demand.

Founded in 1891, Seattle University is one of 28 Jesuit universities in the US. Located in the heart of Seattle, Washington, steps away from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) headquarters, Seattle University has long focused on innovation and excellence in education. That’s why, when a critical application was reaching end of life in 2016, the university saw an opportunity to completely transform its IT landscape. Working closely with AWS, Seattle University has now migrated more than 50 percent of its applications to the AWS Cloud and is actively migrating the remaining 50 percent.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the launch of its first AWS UK Cyber Education Grant Program, a £5 million initiative aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity capabilities of educational institutions across the United Kingdom. Read this post to learn more about the program.

Today, generative artificial intelligence (AI) is at the core of many of the decisions and technologies businesses across the globe are implementing. The linchpin to ensuring that generative AI is effective depends on the foundation models (FMs) storing the data. To make sure that those FMs are pulling the correct data, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed a solution through Amazon Bedrock to generate SQL to answer user questions about the data. The solution was developed to support the Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP) and has optimized their decision-making.

Amazon Web Services launched the India Tech Alliance in February 2024 to boost career readiness for learners and modernize tech programs of study through various applied learning activities. Since launch, participating members in the Tech Alliance have collaborated to deliver more than 50 events that have connected 29,000 learners to employers in India. Read this post to learn more.