For years, U.S. government agencies were reluctant to follow the private sector and move information technology operations to the cloud. Concerns about security, legacy data, and the potential for vendor lock-in kept the federal government firmly planted in separate data centers.

That picture has changed. Today, more than 2,000 government agencies are using Amazon Web Services Inc., and there is a distinct sense of cloud momentum in the public sector. In early February, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded a $950 million cloud contract to AWS partner REAN Cloud LLC. And late last year, AWS announced a new “secret region” for the U.S. Intelligence Community that will serve government workloads across all data classifications in a cloud-based structure.

“Now we’re seeing that security is the enabler,” said Robert Groat (pictured), executive vice president of technology and strategy at Smartronix Inc., an AWS partner. “Organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the cloud from a security perspective that you could never do before.”

Groat spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the AWS public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They discussed Smartronix’s history of working with federal agencies, its role in building a major government website, and the importance of new cloud-based security technologies in public sector adoption.

Deployed first federal agency on AWS

Smartronix was the first company to deploy a federal agency on the AWS platform, and the firm played a significant role in the building of Recovery.gov in 2009. The website was created so that citizens could track spending of $787 billion authorized by Congress under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“We’ve helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly regulated compliance-driven environments utilize technology in innovative ways,” Groat said.

The adoption of cloud services by the federal government is being driven by the increased sophistication of services in the cloud platform. New primitives (programming language elements) can be supplied by AWS around machine learning and artificial intelligence to protect critical operations.

“That can be applied programmatically now across an entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure,” Groat explained. “This was the province of only really large organizations in the past, and now AWS has democratized that ability to use all of these tools around AI and machine learning to improve security.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations at the AWS public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Photo: SiliconANGLE