It was a day of interviews and innovation on June 16 when theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, aired the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security and Life Sciences.

Participants during the event focused on a wide range of important industry topics, many of which were covered in the numerous articles generated by theCUBE as part of the coverage. Here are five additional insights from the AWS Startup Showcase conversations. (* Disclosure below.)

1. Space exploration will turbo boost AI and data management.

It may have been easy to miss a brief, yet significant comment from Ali Ghodsi near the end of his extensive keynote interview with John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, on June 16. The chief executive officer and co-founder of Databricks Inc. has been at the forefront of building a unified platform for data and AI and he sees a tidal wave of data coming from miles above the surface of the Earth.

“We see a lot of alternative data sources coming in from satellite imagery,” Ghodsi said. “These are massive volumes, huge datasets. It’s exciting what they can do. That’s a trend that’s going to continue.”

Using satellite imaging, commercial companies are collecting upwards of 100 terabytes of data per day, 365 days a year. Between 500 to 1,000 additional remote sensing satellites will be launched into orbit over the next five years. And that doesn’t include the data generated from other space exploration efforts led by private companies, such as SpaceX and government-run NASA.

It should be no surprise that Databricks is keeping a close eye on data in space. It is an area where AI can play a major role, as already seen in use of the technology for tracking orbiting debris, mission design and planning, and providing telemetry for preemptive maintenance of the satellites in orbit.

2. Cloud regions matter and they are expanding rapidly.

One week before the Showcase kicked off, AWS announced that the Israel (Tel Aviv) cloud region would open in 2023 with three Availability Zones. AWS alone has 25 regions and 81 Availability Zones in operation today, with previously announced plans to add 21 more zones and 7 regions.

“It’s all about customer choice,” said Jeff Barr, vice president and chief evangelist at AWS, during the keynote session on June 16. “At the heart, the customer gets to choose their locations.”

Why is this important? Cloud provider regions allow users to locate cloud resources closer to customers, which may be important if data must stay within a particular country. Regions also play a role in disaster recovery, latency and cost.

The news has been filled over the past year with announcements from major cloud providers about regional expansion. Microsoft just announced plans to add four new data centers within China as part of its effort to expand service capacity across Asia. Last year, Google LLC launched new cloud regions in Jakarta, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Seoul, with plans to add regions in Qatar, Spain, Italy and France.

There is a competitive factor as well. In April, AWS teamed up with Google to win a lucrative deal for the Nimbus Project, which will provide cloud services to Israeli government agencies from local data centers. The two providers aced out Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and IBM for the contract.

3. Cloud security is a growing concern and compliance automation is hot.

The SolarWinds breach in 2020 sent a distinct chill through the computing world when analysis of the major exploit revealed that attackers were able to bypass security controls and gain entrance to cloud files. This was not a trend any enterprise wanted to see continue, and companies should be quite interested in embracing new approaches.

When one startup wins seven coveted RSA cybersecurity awards, as Anitian Inc. did this spring, it’s worth taking notice of the technology involved. The company offers a path for application security and compliance in the cloud through an automated platform.

More than 6,500 government agencies use AWS, and Anitian’s partnership with the cloud provider has given it entrée into the public sector. What may well be fueling interest in the startup is that its technology addresses one of the key weaknesses exposed by the SolarWinds breach: security checks on developer-generated code before it is shipped.

“Instead of having one gate that becomes a bottleneck, we should have multiple checkpoints at various stages,” said Aditya Muppavarapu, global segment leader of DevOps at AWS Partner Network, in a June interview with theCUBE. “This provides fast feedback for the developers while they’re still in the context of developing that feature so it’s easier and less expensive to fix the issues.”

4. Smart cities are emerging as greenfield opportunities for startup companies.

The premise of a smart city is an urban infrastructure that puts data and digital technology to work for a better, more livable environment. Major tech firms have invested significant resources over the past several years to realize this vision, yet there is a current trend where a number of them appear headed for the freeway out of town.

The most recent example of this can be seen in the announcement by Cisco Systems Inc. that it would end a flagship effort to digitize the modern city. This followed Google’s decision last year to abandon a smart city project in Toronto and withdraw from a similar effort in Portland, Oregon.

An analysis by City Monitor identified 379 fully deployed smart city projects in 2019. By the end of 2020, that number had fallen to just 34.

For a startup company such as ChaosSearch Inc., this translates into a prime business opportunity. The firm’s data platform enables search and analysis of multi-model cloud data on Amazon S3. In partnership with BAI Communications Pty. Ltd, ChaosSearch is supporting cell, Wi-Fi, broadcast, radio and IP networks in major urban areas such as New York, Toronto, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.

The result has been improvement in critical transportation systems, including the urban subway in Toronto.

“When we built the Wi-Fi, it wasn’t with the intention of getting Torontonians across the city faster, but that was one of the values that we were able to get from the data,” said Jeremy Foran, head of data analytics at BAI Communications Pty. Ltd., in a recent interview with theCUBE.

5. Once slow to digitize, the healthcare industry is catching up fast.

Six years ago, many elements of the healthcare industry ranked in the lower third on the digital maturity scale. However, a global pandemic changed that dynamic dramatically and increased healthcare technology investment has fueled a wave of modernization for the sector.

When companies build new businesses on the concept of an “internet of healthcare,” it’s a sure sign that change is in the air. This is one of the driving elements behind Olive AI Inc., a startup focused on providing an AI-enabled robotic process automation solution to more than 600 hospitals.

The startup recently announced a partnership with leading global consumer electronics company ASUS Inc. to further extend AI technologies for healthcare providers.

“You might be sitting there wondering, well why are we talking about automation under the umbrella of AI?” Rohan D’Souza, chief product officer of Olive AI, said in an interview with theCUBE. “And that’s because we are challenging the very status quo of siloed-based automation, and we’re building what we say is the internet of healthcare.”

You can check out all of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security and Life Sciences. (* Disclosure: This event was sponsored by participating companies. Neither AWS nor sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: ESB Professional