AWS Launches Secret Region For US Intelligence Agencies

Six years after introducing a cloud datacenter region for public sector customers, AWS has launched cloud service for US intelligence agencies, and government outfits sufficient secret level access.

Only specific type of government organizations will be able to use this new region.

The cloud giant announced this new offering in a blog post, saying that it has attained authorization to design this cloud service for the CIA and other members of the US intelligence community.

This new region is available as a result of the contract AWS has with the C2S, Commercial Cloud Services, group. Amazon has a $600 million cloud services contract with the US intelligence community, and has been hosting top secret data for the past three years.

Needless to say, this new region will meet certain government standards:

“With the launch of this new Secret Region, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.”

Conveniently named AWS Secret Region, this new service will also be accessible for US government agencies that are not part of the intelligence community — as long as they have their own contract vehicles and sufficient secret level network access.

This announcement from Amazon Web Services comes about a month after Microsoft made a similar one, regarding Azure Government Secret that will support workloads for agencies and partners that are work with data that is classified as secret.

Worth a mention that AWS is already operating the original Top Secret cloud.

But while this air gapped service was limited to intelligence communities, this new Secret Region is available to all government agencies, and stands separate from the existing Amazon GovCloud.