Amazon Web Services announced it is launching GovCloud, an AWS Region “designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud.”
According to AWS, the new Region adheres to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and supports AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points and PCI DSS Level 1. GovCloud features include AWS services Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Federal agencies currently using AWS include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, State and Treasury.
“By working with cloud computing providers such as AWS, we gain the flexibility to move quickly, acquire IT resources on-demand and save money by paying only for the resources we use. This implements the JPL CIO, Jim Rinaldi’s, vision of provisioning instead of procuring hardware. As we move more workloads into the cloud, we look forward to leveraging ITAR compliant clouds, such as the new AWS GovCloud for our compliance-dependent projects so we can continue to look to the cloud first for even more missions,” said NASA JPL Chief Technology Officer Tomas Soderstrom.
