Amazon has launched a government only cloud for federal Cloud Services.
The project ensures that the government stays compliant with regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which states that only US citizens may access data regarding weapons, as well as other items which have been banned from export on the US munitions list.
An Amazon spokesman said “because Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by US persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements.”
Amazon have tactically worked alongside the US federal government in order to help achieve their target of shutting down approximately 40% of the 2,000 plus data centres they have, saving approximately $3 billion.
Other big players are however in the mix to gain responsibility of government data including Google, IBM and Microsoft. Overall $20 billion in revenue has been identified that can be utilised to move a quarter of the federal IT infrastructure to the Cloud, saving $5 billion annually.
Amazon’s new offering complies with all the other portions of its public cloud but additionally allows compliance with other regulations governing federal data such as the Federal Information Security Management Act and Portability Act. In addition the new invocation supports many existing security certifications including FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, and PCI DSS Level 1.
