Empower educators with secure, cost-effective, and recyclable sandbox environments that accelerate learning objectives and enable students to experiment with AWS services without administrative overhead.
While generative AI revolutionizes technology, educational institutions need scalable sandbox environments to equip students with hands-on cloud experience. Innovation Sandbox on AWS eliminates the administrative complexity of managing hundreds of temporary learning environments, enabling educators to focus on innovation and skill building.
Managing sandbox environments at scale for educational institutions presents unique challenges that can divert valuable resources from core educational missions.
Students may inadvertently deploy costly resources or leave them running, resulting in unplanned expenses requiring continuous monitoring and cost control measures.
Balancing experimentation flexibility with security requires implementing strict identity and access management while preventing misconfigurations and unauthorized access.
Temporary sandbox environments often require weeks of administration time to provision, configure, and eventually decommission, diverting focus from strategic educational objectives.
Innovation Sandbox on AWS transforms how educational institutions approach cloud experimentation, providing secure, automated, and cost-effective sandbox management.
Built for customers with AWS Organizations enabled, this solution transforms how administrators set up and manage complete sandbox environment lifecycles through an intuitive user interface.
The solution enables implementation of security policies, approval workflows, spend management mechanisms, and account recycling preferences, all while remaining adaptable to existing AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone setups.
By automating the technical heavy-lifting, educational institutions save weeks of administrative hours while providing students, researchers, and faculty the freedom to innovate on AWS.
Secure • Cost-Effective • Recyclable • Automated
Innovation Sandbox on AWS supports diverse educational scenarios, from classroom learning to advanced research and professional development.
Educators can create and manage disposable cloud environments for classroom labs, examinations, and training programs, providing students with hands-on AWS experience in controlled settings.
Support cloud and generative AI research experiments in controlled environments, enabling researchers to verify hypotheses and conduct innovative studies across disciplines.
Quickly deploy temporary sandbox environments for student hackathons and coding competitions, providing teams with isolated AWS accounts for innovation and collaboration.
Deliver hands-on learning experiences to upskill campus IT and academic staff, enabling them to explore AWS services and prove approaches before production implementation.
Innovation Sandbox on AWS was designed for three key personas within educational institutions, each with distinct needs and workflows.
The solution eliminates weeks of manual configuration and operational overhead by automating security policies, spend controls, and recycling mechanisms across all sandbox accounts. Administrators can quickly deploy CloudFormation templates, configure user access through AWS IAM Identity Center, and onboard existing accounts to create sandbox pools.
Academic staff can revolutionize hands-on cloud learning delivery through an intuitive UI that enables quick creation of lease templates with spend and time limits, threshold-based actions, and approval preferences. They maintain precise control over student interactions and complete oversight into usage monitoring across all leases.
Students can request sandbox leases in a self-service manner, choosing from predefined templates. Upon approval, they quickly access AWS accounts for innovation experiments, creating valuable portfolio material for employers while gaining practical cloud skills highly sought in the job market.
Discover how universities worldwide are leveraging Innovation Sandbox on AWS to transform their educational delivery and operational efficiency.
Research-focused public institution, UK • 30,000+ students
The University of Sheffield faced inefficiencies in sandbox account lifecycle management and needed AWS environments for teaching without technical expertise for security and cost controls.
Using Innovation Sandbox on AWS, they transferred account allocation authority to administrative and academic staff, configured account recycling based on spend limits and course duration, and gained comprehensive visibility into usage across all sandbox leases.
Streamlined processes through automated account management
Isolated sandboxes with minimal IT overhead
Integrated AWS tools with budget management
Reduced IT involvement through automation
Public educational institution, London • 40,000+ students, 160+ nationalities
UEL's Engineering & Computing departments needed to evolve beyond AWS Academy to provide more comprehensive experiential learning environments with isolated, long-term project support and greater flexibility for advanced cloud-native and AI skills.
The university deployed Innovation Sandbox on AWS and onboarded over 330 sandbox accounts, providing a self-service portal for students to request AWS account leases in minutes with built-in controls for approval, duration, and cleanup. Academic staff gained centralized monitoring capabilities without technical overhead.
Managed through simplified lifecycle management
Students maintain environments for full lease duration
Access to Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda without IT intervention
Automated cleanup and guardrails for large cohorts
Vietnam's first multidisciplinary technical university • 40,000+ students
HUST launched HACK TOGETHER 2025, a national hackathon for improving banking sector user experience. With 24 teams building technical solutions in two weeks, they needed secure, isolated environments with scalability, governance, cost control, and minimal operational overhead.
Working with AWS, HUST implemented Innovation Sandbox on AWS to onboard 24 hackathon teams to isolated AWS accounts within days, configured with automated governance, guardrails, spending caps, monitoring, and scheduled lease expiration for resource cleanup.
In days, with zero manual provisioning
Isolated environments for safe experimentation
Automated guardrails prevented overages
Framework for future innovation initiatives
Dive deeper into how Innovation Sandbox on AWS is transforming educational institutions worldwide. Read our comprehensive blog post featuring detailed case studies, technical insights, and implementation guidance.
Read Full Blog PostInnovation Sandbox on AWS offers a powerful solution to streamline sandbox environment management while maintaining security, improving cost management, and ensuring recyclability.