(AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
By
Amazon Web Services today announced a second cloud computing region designed specifically to host the federal government’s top secret classified information.
Called AWS Top Secret-West, the region provides additional geographic availability and resiliency of AWS cloud services for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, including the CIA and NSA, on which to host, analyze and run applications.
AWS Top Secret-West is the company’s second commercial cloud accredited for classified workloads that is air-gapped—or shut off—from the rest of the internet. The new region joins AWS Top Secret-East, which has been hosting the government’s top secret data since 2014.
AWS did not disclose the location of the region except to say it is “over 1,000” miles away from AWS Top Secret-East, which is located in northern Virginia.
“With two top secret regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence and national security communities can deploy multi-region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Max Peterson said in a blog post Monday. “In addition, they gain proximity to new geographically distributed workloads and mission users.”
The new cloud region comes almost eight years after AWS won a $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA. Since then, the intelligence community’s use of commercial cloud services has increased significantly, as has AWS’ investments—including its new region—serving those unique cloud customers.
As AWS’ market share grows, only one of AWS’ current rivals for government business—Microsoft—has achieved government accreditations necessary to host top secret classified data, which the company announced in August.
In November 2020, the CIA announced AWS and Microsoft were two of five companies—along with IBM, Oracle and Google—to be awarded its Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E contract, which procurement documents indicated could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars over the next 15 years. After canceling its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, the Pentagon announced in November that AWS, Microsoft, Oracle and Google will bid on its upcoming multibillion-dollar Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC contract.
The NSA, too, is investing in commercial cloud computing services, awarding AWS a contract worth up to $10 billion in August to modernize its primary data repository. Microsoft challenged the award with the Government Accountability Office, which ultimately recommended in October the agency reevaluate proposals from both companies.
In an October interview with Nextgov, acting Intelligence Community Chief Information Officer Mike Waschull offered some insight into why commercial cloud computing is figuring so heavily into defense and intelligence agency missions. Washull said the cloud provides a scalable environment where a mix of open-source and classified datasets can be brought together for various purposes, such as processing, storage or analysis, and noted that cloud also helps in the retirement of old hardware systems and data centers.
“We’re looking real hard at the data centers that we have and where it’s appropriate, we’re trying to bring those to closure, if you will, and retire them in favor of moving to the commercial cloud,” Waschull said.
The battle for the government’s cloud dollars is a microcosm of the jostling for dominance in a global cloud computing market that could soon be worth $1 trillion as nearly every major private sector company invests in cloud services. Third parties like Gartner have rated AWS as cloud computing’s market leader since the technology’s nascent days, but the company was also the first to specifically service government customers.
In 2011, AWS launched GovCloud (US-West), becoming the first commercial cloud provider to meet the federal government’s stringent security requirements and compliance designations to host unclassified government workloads. Today, nearly every major cloud service provider offers government solutions for unclassified workloads in a growing federal cloud market Bloomberg Government estimates is approaching $7 billion, but Peterson said AWS is not slowing its pace of innovation.
“Today, with the launch of AWS Top Secret-West, we continue our support for mission workloads that span the full range of U.S. government classifications,” Peterson said. “As we continue to innovate with our customers, they gain tools to achieve their missions with greater speed, agility, and security.”
NEXT STORY: Report: Government Inaction on 6G Risks Ceding More Tech Ground to China
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.
Manage Consent Preferences
Strictly Necessary Cookies – Always Active
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link
If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.
Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.
Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.
If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.
Cookie List
A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:
Strictly Necessary Cookies
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Functional Cookies
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Performance Cookies
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Sale of Personal Data
We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.
Social Media Cookies
We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.
Targeting Cookies
We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.
Help us tailor content specifically for you: