Data Lakes, Rapid Migration, and Better Decision Making
When COVID-19 was first observed, it quickly became apparent that speed and agility for response would be critical to saving lives. The ability to collect and analyze data is central to this. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has proved itself to be equal to this challenge, supporting governments and businesses in its response to COVID-19.
Three ways that AWS has achieved this is by creating a public source for crucial COVID-19 data, enabling faster migration outcomes, and helping organizations to make better decisions.
The AWS COVID-19 Data Lake
The AWS COVID-19 data lake is hosted on the AWS cloud, and makes huge amounts of COVID-19-related data more easily accessible. This means that federal and state governments, healthcare organizations, businesses, and others can use this data to improve their decision making as their response to COVID-19 evolves.
For example, hospitals can use the information stored to be more efficient with bed and ventilator deployment. Scientists can analyze the data to make more accurate and meaningful forecasts of where outbreaks will occur, and this helps to inform governmental responses.
The COVID-19 data lake contains up-to-date and updated data that has been processed, is readable, and is ready for immediate analysis. This data has been added by qualified data providers via AWS Data Exchange. These providers include the likes of: The New York Times; The COVID Tracking Project; Definitive Healthcare; Delphi Research Group; and research data from curated articles from the Allen Institute for AI.
AWS: Enabling Rapid Migration
By focusing on data-led migration rather than app-led migration, AWS customers have been able to migrate in two to three months (or less) versus an average of a year. This has helped them to scale their operations more effectively too.
For example, Palantir was able to migrate all the data used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs – which, like most data held by most organizations, was fragmented and locked in silos – to AWS in just four weeks.
This enabled more effective and faster responses to COVID-19 outbreak areas, with timely decisions enabled by information that included supply chain data, hospital inventory data, and social services data. Without this capability, response times and effectiveness would have been severely hindered. Instead of getting ahead of COVID-19, it is likely that we would have been dropping further behind the curve.
AWS: Helping Organizations Make Better Decisions
AWS has been working closely with many organizations around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes the World Health Organization and public and private health providers around the world.
One such organization is the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). AWS cloud computing helped it to quickly launch a response platform for critical public services. This allowed the NHS to visualize information from all its parts to enable the most efficient allocation of resources.
Managers were able to analyze fluid data flows to arrive at better understanding of how the virus was spreading, which parts of the NHS (and locations) would come under most strain, and which healthcare interventions were delivering the best results.
Immediately, it could be seen how many patients were where across the country, how many ventilators were being used, where they were being used, and how many trained staff were available. This enabled effective deployment of machines and humans across the entire country. The result of AWS support can be summarized as:
- Supporting rapid innovation at scale
- Helping to control virus spread
- Enabling more efficient and effective care across the UK
- Enabling more effective COVID-19 research
AWS – Helping to Drive Efficiency and Save Lives
Enabling rapid and effective deployment of resources, reducing spread of the virus, protecting the public and NHS staff, and ensuring more people could get the healthcare they required. Just a few of the achievements that have been aided by the NHS partnership with AWS.
Just imagine what AWS could do for your business. In fact, you don’t have to imagine. Contact Gravity IT Resources today. We’ll be happy to discuss the benefits to your business and how to migrate to AWS so that you, too, can benefit from all its advantages.
