Amazon to launch second secret cloud region, touting AI innovation for national security

By the end of the year, federal agencies using Amazon Web Services cloud at the secret classified level will have a second region dedicated to their needs, the company announced Tuesday, touting the coming launch as a boon for artificial intelligence innovation for agencies in the national security space.

AWS’s forthcoming Secret-West Region will allow federal customers with secret-level workloads to deploy IT architectures in multiple cloud infrastructure regions, aiming to improve the resilience and speed of those mission sets, Dave Levy, vice president of worldwide public sector, announced during a keynote at the AWS Public Sector Summit.

“The launch of the AWS Secret-West Region will strengthen U.S. AI leadership and accelerate the development of advanced capabilities and groundbreaking innovation,” Levy said in a statement ahead of the announcement. “Customers using the new AWS Secret-West Region will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud provider and see their critical missions enhanced by the operational speed, scalability, security, and innovation that AWS provides.”

The launch comes after AWS has served as the pace-setter for public sector cloud computing for highly sensitive and classified missions. In 2017, with the introduction of its first secret region, the company was the first to meet the federal government’s needs at all levels of data classification, from unclassified to top secret. And in 2021, it launched its AWS Top Secret-West Region, the second at that level.

During his keynote, Levy spoke to AWS’s commitment to security, saying it has “always been our foundation.”

“We help you maintain maximum security compliance and resilience. You trust us with your applications and data, and our security begins at the hardware level, and it goes all the way up the stack, and you have full control of your applications,” he said. “That’s a really, really important point. You have control of your applications and your data. Nobody can access it, not even us.”

Part of that legacy, AWS singlehandedly won the $600 million CIA’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) in 2013, and since then was awarded one of five spots on the intelligence community’s follow-on multibillion-dollar Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract in 2020.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose office stands to benefit from the new region, joined Levy on stage during his keynote Tuesday and credited cloud companies like Amazon for supporting the intelligence community’s ability to innovate and deploy AI at secret and top-secret classified levels.

“Opening up and making it possible for us to use AI applications in the top secret clouds has been a game changer,” Gabbard said.

As the IC strives to modernize — a term that Gabbard said is “overused” — it’s looking to AWS and other companies to understand the “available tools that exist, largely in the private sector, to make it so that our intelligence professionals, both collectors and analysts, are able to focus their time and energy on the things that only they can do,” the national intelligence director said.

“And so this is where a lot of the work that we’re doing with AWS and other organizations really is, searching for those tools that we know are available that you guys spend a lot of time building, and how we can best apply those to make sure that we are accomplishing our core mission,” Gabbard continued. “And then, of course, focusing on what are the greatest threats that we face, and how can we maximize our intelligence collection and analysis capabilities, to have the best oversight and visibility to best inform our policymakers so we can ensure, ultimately, the safety, security and freedom of the American people.”