AWS GovCloud (US) launched by Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched AWS GovCloud for the US Government. This cloud (computing) based service will strictly follow government regulations.
This service will be available to store and process sensitive data and workloads respectively and is in cost-effective, flexible and, most importantly, secure access by U.S. federal government, state and local governments, and the contractors supporting the project.
This new government cloud service was introduced by Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, at the 2011 NASA IT Summit on Aug. 16 in San Francisco.
According to company reports, AWS GovCloud (US) supports storage and processing of International Traffic in Arms (ITAR, which can only be accessed by U.S. citizens) and AWS gives an environment to agencies for complying with HIPAA regulations. Moreover, this region of AWS (along with other regions) provides FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) moderate controls and also supports existing certifications and security controls such as FIPS 140-2, PCI DSS Level 1, SAS 70 and ISO 27001. All these provide high level of security for U.S. Government.
According to PCWorld, “NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and the U.S. Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board are two federal agencies that already use AWS.”
Pricing for AWS services are available on the website.
According to reports by Amazon, investing on the AWS infrastructure also has impact on raising the capital expenditures of the company from $336 million to $731 million dollar, for the six months ended in June. However, revenue from “non-retail” activities, which include the services of AWS increased from $203 million to $359 million, for the quarter ended in June 30. Total revenue increased from $6.6 billion to $9.9 billion as reported by Amazon.
