Military Green Lights Amazon Cloud Services for Defensewide Use

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Aliya Sternstein.

The Pentagon has authorized Amazon Web Services to rent computing space to all Defense Department components, company officials announced on Wednesday. The decision was based on past security tests conducted through the governmentwide Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, as well as an evaluation of additional Defense-specific protections.

Any contractor hoping to sell government agencies cloud services must pass FedRAMP by June. Approval signifies a system is safe for use governmentwide and comes with a reusable set of documented tests to prove it. Some agencies that determine FedRAMP protections, such as, perhaps, antivirus scans, do not meet their security needs can add more controls. The Pentagon is one such customer…

The Defense Information Systems Agency assessed Amazon Web Services’ "compliance with those additional security controls and approved AWS cloud computing services, reducing the time necessary for DoD agencies to evaluate and authorize the use of the AWS cloud," company officials said in a statement. Various military components already use Amazon products, including the Navy and Air Force. The new sanction is intended to save other military organizations time and money on installing Amazon’s services…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2014/03/military-green-lights-amazon-cloud-services-defensewide-use/81298/

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb