Iowa City awarded $25,000 in cloud services through Amazon program

IOWA CITY - Amazon has awarded the city of Iowa City $25,000 in cloud services.

According to a news release, Amazon announced on Wednesday that Iowa City is the winner of the company's Dream Big Award, which is part of its City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge. The city's news release states the Dream Big Award seeks to help a city or school 'implement a great idea.”

Iowa City police officer David Schwindt, who was in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to accept the award during the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, said the city applied for the award in May. Schwindt said the city has used Amazon Web Services as part of its Data-Driven Justice Initiative. The goal of the initiative, a partnership with Johnson County and Shelter House, is to identify people who would benefit from a pre-jail diversion program.

'The way we're using Amazon Web Services is what won us the award,” Schwindt said Wednesday. 'We're using their services to house, analyze and secure that data within AWS.”

With the $25,000 in cloud services, Iowa City will have access to Amazon's storage capabilities, computing power and staff, which can help the city use the services as efficiently as possible.

'We're going to be working directly with Amazon staff to identify ways we can use that,” Schwindt said.

One such possibility is establishing an online portal for storing in-car and body camera video, Schwindt said.

'That's just one of the ideas we'll be looking at,” he said.

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