Customers can offset the cost of storing their data on the AWS cloud
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Project Resilience in Australia, offering US$5000 in credits to eligible local government, education, and small community organisations to help prepare them in facing natural and man-made disasters.
AWS public sector A/NZ country director, Iain Rouse said the availability of Project Resilience in Australia will help customers offset the cost of storing their data on AWS.
In addition, even if equipment such as laptops and servers are damaged in a disaster, critical data will still be securely stored and accessible in the AWS cloud.
“AWS can also help organisations support rapid spikes in traffic to their websites and calls to their contact centres leading up to and during events, and to analyse data to improve early warning systems and damage assessments,” Rouse said. “By taking immediate action through AWS Project Resilience, we can enable our communities to better prepare and respond to disasters, while we continue to create and implement long-term solutions.”
Eligible existing AWS customers can also submit a request to offset costs incurred when using its CloudEndure disaster recovery service, which allows customers to back up their software applications.
Last year, AWS introduced its Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency, which allows customers to identify partners with proven success in helping businesses implement secure, reliable, cloud-enabled solutions that enhance public safety and disaster response capabilities.
Melbourne-based Whispir has been working with Moreton Bay Regional Council to develop a platform to provide disaster management alerts to residents and complement existing warnings issued by the Bureau of Meteorology and other emergency service agencies.
Whispir has also worked with Cairns Regional Council to implement an emergency communications platform, targeting specific audiences in specific parts of the city.
Whispir also developed a Critical Messaging System for the Emergency WA website, providing a customised process of disseminating alerts and warnings across all platforms, including social media, RSS feeds and stakeholder emails.
Another example involves Queensland headquartered Fireball.International which has built AWS services to deliver a fire detection pipeline to alert first responders to potential incidents rapidly.
Their solution processes more than 2.5 million images per day from ground-based sensors coupled with satellite imagery to aggregate areas of detection and accurately predict a fire location. The imagery is stored in Amazon S3, which are then inferred upon by machine learning models that are built and trained continuously.
Its analytics inference service runs on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and calls on both Amazon Simple Notification Service and Amazon Simple Email Service to notify front line responders to send alerts within two minutes of smoke detection.
In another instance, Arq Group along with NSW Rural Fire Service built the Fires Near Me app, which runs on AWS.
By migrating workloads to AWS, the NSW RFS improved reliability, redundancy, scalability, and elasticity. AWS helped NSW RFS manage an environment where during large fire events, user views of their sites and apps can jump from thousands to 10 million within hours.
On one of the worst days of the 2019-20 bushfires, the app sent 12 million notifications to users.
“One of the most critical tasks during a disaster is to ensure that data regarding people, assets and services remain safe and accessible, even when it is under threat,” Rouse said. “Data can play a vital role in coordinating relief efforts, especially when it relates to the locations of people in danger, or to assets that might be used in disaster response.
“It’s vital that this data remains safe, as it is often during times of crisis when it’s most needed. AWS can help organisations avoid data loss due to damaged equipment, support spikes in traffic to their websites and calls to their contact centres leading up to and during events, and analyse data to improve early warning systems and damage assessments.”
by 16 December, 2020 06:00
