AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

We are excited to highlight 165 AWS Partners that received new or renewed specializations in January for our global AWS Competency, AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP), AWS Service Delivery, and AWS Service Ready programs. These designations span workload, solution, and industry, and help AWS customers identify top AWS Partners that can deliver on core business objectives. AWS Partners are focused on your success, helping customers take full advantage of the business benefits AWS has to offer.

Marriott’s CISO Arno Van Der Walt manages cybersecurity through a “human-centered, data-driven, technology-enabled” approach aimed at making security frictionless. Critical partnerships with AWS, Deloitte, and Palo Alto Networks leverage AI/ML to share threat data and empower “impossible” autonomous security. Together, their tri-party services provide an end-to-end platform unifying business and security data to detect threats and enable quick response.

Customers implementing sophisticated solutions based on AWS technologies often seek out qualified partners who bring their industry expertise to the table and help accelerate a return on investment (ROI) that achieves business outcomes faster. Partner-Led Support offers AWS Partners the opportunity to expand their sources of recurring revenue by complementing and supplementing AWS capabilities in delivering technical support to customers.

In today’s fast-paced world, small and medium businesses (SMBs) are leveraging the power of the cloud to drive innovation, reach new customers, develop new revenue streams, and increase productivity. To support this journey, the AWS Small and Medium Business Competency helps customers find partner solutions that support the diverse and evolving needs of their business. SMB Competency Partners offer a wide range of solutions, including migration and modernization, security, data storage, AI/ML, and more.

To grow with AWS, partners can pursue Competency designations which validate an organization’s expertise through rigorous assessment by AWS experts. By meeting requirements around projects, certifications, and capabilities, partners can demonstrate their proficiency and earn an AWS specialization badge in specific industries, use cases, or workloads. Attaining an AWS Competency distinguishes partners, but the preparation process also transforms practices.

As we continue to transform the AWS Partner experience, we’re excited to share updates to the Validation Checklists (VCL) for AWS Specialization Programs (AWS Competency, Managed Service Provider, Service Delivery, and Service Ready). Effective January 1, 2024, the updates drive efficiencies during onboarding, allowing partners to achieve an AWS Specialization faster and making it easier to utilize benefits.

Achieving FedRAMP authorization is critical for cloud service providers serving government agencies. Orca Security’s cloud-native platform on AWS provides comprehensive coverage to help companies navigate the complexities of FedRAMP. By determining impact levels, deploying in FedRAMP-compliant AWS regions, leveraging approved services, implementing security controls, preparing for authorization, and enabling continuous monitoring, Orca and AWS streamline the journey to FedRAMP compliance.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives are gaining traction, but companies often struggle to measure progress. The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) offers clearly-defined greenhouse gas emission reduction targets aligned with global climate goals. Choosing the right tools, like the Adonis carbon management platform from eCloudvalley, is critical for data integration, effective tracking, and sustainability strategy optimization on this journey.

Generating high-quality synthetic data protects privacy and augments scarce real-world data for training machine learning models. This post shows how to integrate the Gretel synthetic data platform with Amazon SageMaker Pipelines for a full ML workflow. Gretel’s integration with SageMaker Pipelines in a hybrid or fully managed cloud environment enables responsible and robust adoption of AI while optimizing model accuracy. With Gretel, data scientists can overcome data scarcity without compromising individuals’ privacy.

AWS Backup simplifies policy-based data protection at scale, and observability offers insights into the backup process for monitoring, issue detection, troubleshooting, and optimization. This ensures backup dependability, efficiency, and security. CloudQuery enables managing and visualizing AWS Backup across accounts, including backup health, configuration, and protected resources to facilitate building a robust compliance posture.

Sentieon genomics analysis tools and MemVerge’s Memory Machine Cloud (MMCloud) reduce cost and improve performance for next-generation sequencing pipelines on AWS. MMCloud monitors job resource usage and seamlessly migrates running processes between optimally sized Amazon EC2 instances. Tests with a Sentieon whole genome sequencing pipeline showed a 40% decrease in runtime and 34% cost reduction versus running on a single overprovisioned instance.

Sustainability is a strategic priority for organizations in the global transition to net-zero emissions. Many AWS Partners have chosen to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to achieve their decarbonization goals. Learn how to incorporate sustainability into your organization with a CCoE and how AWS services can help. With these efforts in place, your business can consider joining the 460 signatories who have signed The Climate Pledge and are working towards carbon neutrality by 2040.

Social media is an integral part of everyday life as billions use it to connect, share, and find entertainment. Hootsuite provides businesses with a secure, scalable platform to manage social media across channels, analyze performance, and deliver customer care. By leveraging AWS services, Hootsuite offers robust tools to help brands economically manage their digital footprint, better understand their audience, and optimize their social media investments.

Data observability enables monitoring, understanding, and troubleshooting data pipelines to ensure smooth and efficient workflows. By tracking metrics like lineage, volume, and schema, data engineers can quickly identify issues, optimize performance, and make informed decisions. TCS outlines an approach using AWS services for event ingestion, aggregation, and visualization to address observability challenges.

ADP provides cloud-based human capital management solutions to over 1 million clients in 140 countries. Using an active-active multi-region architecture on AWS, ADP built a highly available and resilient Voice of Employee application to collect employee feedback throughout the workforce lifecycle. The multi-region deployment meets availability goals and leverages AWS services to enable rapid disaster recovery.