AWS Launches 'Secret' Cloud Region For The Intelligence Community

Amazon is known as one of the largest e-commerce on the web, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), is its cloud computing arm.

After six years AWS introducing GovCloud, its first data-center region for public-sector customers, AWS has since announced plans to expand GovCloud. And one of the result is the company in announcing 'Secret Region', a service specifically made for the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community.

The name "Secret Region' isn’t quite as secret as the name implies.

The word "secret" here just means that it’s qualified to host software and data that are classified at the "secret" level. The 'Secret Region' sits right below 'Top Secret Region' which was first introduced in 2014 as part of the $600 million deal with the CIA.

The Secret Region and the Top Secret Region are just two of the many regions Amazon operates as part of its AWS supercomputing cloud.

For example, the largest region Amazon is its US-East-1.

The 'Secret Region' is available to customers as a result of AWS' contract with the intelligence community's Commercial Cloud Services, or C2S, group, and it will meet certain government standards, Amazon said.

But the region will also be accessible for U.S. government organizations that aren't part of the intelligence community, assuming they have the right paperwork, having their own "contract vehicles" and sufficient secret-level network access, Amazon said.

So the key difference between "Secret Region" and the "Top Secret Region" is that the Secret Region is available for non-intelligence government agencies, while the Top Secret Region is only for intelligence government agencies.

The Secret Region is available to all government agencies and stands separate from the earlier work AWS did with the CIA and others, as well as the existing Amazon GovCloud.

The government and Amazon are promoting the new service as a way for the U.S. intelligence community to modernize its infrastructure and more quickly get more information to the appropriate people.

Secret Region is the extension of the Top Secret Region, which further underlines the market dominance of AWS, making it more applicable to intelligence agencies, which regularly deal with sensitive information.

After all, Amazon has won the deal with CIA, beating IBM in the first place.

While Microsoft also offers "Secret"-level services to the intelligence community, it doesn’t have a "Top Secret" cloud.

Google that is also AWS' competitor, has long offered its G Suite to government customers. But the company's effort to bring on more enterprise users has not quite extended to government agencies and their cloud computing needs.

"With the launch of this new Secret Region, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret," said Amazon in a blog post.

Published: 
21/11/2017