The Atlas of Living Australia’s Journey to Empower Biodiversity Research through Public Cloud
Sathish Sathyamoorthy2, Fabiana Santana1 1Amazon Web Services, Canberra, ACT, Australia2Atlas of Living Australia, National Collections & Marine Infrastructure, CSIRO, Black Mountain, ACT, Australia
Abstract
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a collaborative open infrastructure that pulls together Australian biodiversity data from multiple sources, making it accessible and reusable for scientists, policymakers, government, industry and the general public.
The ALA has embraced the potential of cloud computing since 2014, using cloud infrastructure provided by NCI and Nectar, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their public cloud provider, allowing the ALA to combine storage, compute, database and serverless services into their solutions.
In 2022, the ALA started a program to improve its user experience and security posture. It began by upgrading core applications to leverage the OpenID protocol for seamless authentication and authorisation across ALA portals and applications with a single set of credentials and OpenID Connect, built on OAuth 2.0, to guarantee secure and standardised integration.
By leveraging public cloud services such as Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Cognito, the ALA added scalability, multi-factor authentication (MFA), audit, encryption, and compromised credential detection, among others, ensuring robust security and privacy, and federation with identity providers like Australian Access Federation and social login (e.g., Facebook, Google).
The ALA now supports machine-to-machine interactions, single-page applications (SPA), native mobile apps, and API access. It provides researchers and stakeholders access to over 114 million species occurrence records, comprehensive taxonomy for more than 153,000 species, and over 150 web services for data accessibility and functionality. By leveraging secure and scalable cloud solutions, the ALA delivers its mission of enabling open, accessible, and reusable data to support world-class research and decision-making.
Biography
Dr Fabiana Santana is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. Fabiana works with government agencies, universities, and research organisations to help define their research and technical strategy and deliver key programs using AWS. Fabiana was the Head of the School of ITS at the University of Canberra and a Senior Manager at the NCI and the Banking Industry. Fabiana is a computer scientist with a PhD in electrical engineering and a Masters in HPC. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Elsevier Ecological Informatics journal and contributes to other journals on Biodiversity and Climate Change.