As hurricane season kicks off, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is touting its capability to use cloud services and AWS Snowball Edge devices to process vast amounts of data for natural disaster damage assessment in environments with little to no connectivity.

"Cloud technology is enabling organizations and communities to respond faster and more effectively than ever before," AWS's Danielle Morris, senior manager of social responsibility and impact, told SDxCentral. Improved visibility and accelerated analytics provided by the cloud are "especially useful for things like capturing aerial imagery of a disaster-stricken area and turning the data into 3D maps," which empowers communities to make informed decisions about temporary shelter locations and where to send responders, she explained.

According to Morris, the cloud provider's natural disaster response program is "driven by the desire to help communities more efficiently prepare for and respond to" global disasters globally with the help of AWS cloud technology.

At the heart of these efforts are the AWS Disaster Response vehicles, each equipped with two of the hyperscaler's Snowball Edge devices — portable compute hardware devices with 80 TB of storage and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) functionality. These 50-pound, suitcase-sized devices are "designed to be tough" and meet the U.S. military's requirements for being air-dropped, Morris added.

Snowball Edge's capability to operate in harsh physical conditions renders it a natural fit for disaster response situations, and AWS teams are able to use the high-density compute and storage to process data "in disconnected environments following real or simulated natural disaster events," she noted.

Following tornadoes in Kentucky two years ago, for example, AWS worked with nonprofit Help.NGO to assess damage by collecting and analyzing drone imagery in a matter of hours, which is "an exercise that can take days in low connectivity environments," Morris noted. Thanks to the disaster response vehicle, that data "supported the creation of detailed 2D and 3D maps that Help.NGO shared with local first responders and government officials to assess the scale of the damage and inform recovery efforts," she explained.

AWS' disaster response program launched in 2018 with one pilot vehicle "to prove the model," and the hyperscaler now has three vehicles total. The company plans to use the vehicles "to support disaster preparation exercises" through its field test program, and it also expects to deploy them throughout the US for response operations.

Morris cited 2017's hurricanes – Harvey, Irma and Maria – as major catalysts for the program's development. "Those disasters validated the need for the disaster response team’s work," which initially helped out with Red Cross call centers challenges by setting up a cloud-based calling center for additional support capacity. The hyperscaler's "response to these hurricanes showed how the cloud could make a difference" in addressing natural disasters and supporting local communities.