Amazon Web Services revealed June 13 that it is planning to offer government agencies, regulated industries and software-as-a-service providers a second highly secure location to park and process data in its global cloud.
AWS GovCloud (U.S.) gives AWS customers a place to host sensitive data and regulated workloads within the AWS Cloud. The first AWS GovCloud region was launched in 2011 on the U.S. west coast; the company aims to open a second region, AWS GovCloud (U.S.-East), sometime in 2018.
The new cloud-service region will provide customers with added workload redundancy, data durability and resiliency, and it will provide additional options for disaster recovery, AWS spokesman Jeff Barr said.
Like the GovCloud region, the U.S.-East region will be isolated and meet top U.S. government compliance requirements including:
- International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR);
- NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology);
- Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate and High;
- Department of Defense Impact Levels 2-4;
- DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement);
- Internal Revenue Service Publication 1075 (IRS 1075) for encryption, and
- Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) requirements.
Government agencies and the IT contactors that serve them were early adopters of AWS GovCloud (US), as were companies in regulated industries. These organizations are able to use the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of public cloud while benefiting from the isolation and data protection offered by a region designed and built to meet their regulatory needs and to help them to meet their compliance requirements, Barr said.
Here’s a listing of current AWS GovCloud users:
Federal (U.S.) government: Department of Veterans Affairs, General Services Administration 18F (Digital Services Delivery), NASA JPL, Defense Digital Service, United States Air Force, United States Department of Justice.
Regulated industries: CSRA, Talen Energy, Cobham Electronics.
SaaS and solution providers: FIGmd, Blackboard, Splunk, GitHub, Motorola.
Federal, state, and local agencies that want to move their existing applications to the AWS Cloud can take advantage of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) offered by AWS Professional Services.
Go to the GovCloud (U.S.) page to learn more about the compliance regimes that AWS supports.