Uncle Sam Gets His Very Own Amazon Cloud
August 21, 2011
Out to get its share of the shrinking federal gravy train, Amazon Web Services Tuesday came up with AWS GovCloud, which it claims is safe enough for Washington and its legion of contractors to run "more sensitive" workloads on by resolving at least some of the regulatory and compliance issues that have restrained them from using the cloud before…
Amazon’s timing is nice since the Office of Management and Budget recently told federal agencies they have to close down 800 of their way-too-many data centers by 2015.
Amazon says GovCloud is a new AWS Region physically and logically accessible only by US persons so that should overcome the restrictions hindering, say, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, from using the cloud.
Otherwise it offers the same security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, SAS-70, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1. Amazon says it also enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations.
Ironically GovCloud is on the West Coast 3,000 miles away from Washington.
The widgetry available consists of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), EC2 and S3. Users will need to sign an AWS GovCloud Enterprise agreement that requires a manual step beyond the usual self-service sign-up process and use VPC to organize their AWS resources.
AWS CTO Werner Vogels expects GovCloud to be used for massive data processing and analytics that puts the "Big in Big Data, sometimes several orders of magnitude larger than commonly found in industry."
Amazon also hopes to set up specialized regions for other government.
Apparently there are already over 100 US agencies that don’t have regulatory and compliance issues using AWS for one thing and another.