Amazon Bats Eyes at Gov’t Sector with New Cloud Services
Today Amazon made an announcement that placed it two steps of the competition: it unveiled GovCloud, what is essentially an ultra secure version of six Amazon Web Services designed for the use of government agencies: Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, Elastic Block Store, Virtual Private Cloud, Identity and Access Management, and CloudWatch. That number will grow to encompass additional services as well, with updates expected to be rolled out in the near future.
“Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by U.S. persons only (the actual instances reside within an AWS virtual private cloud), government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements.”
The different between GovCloud and the standard AWS is that the former complies with sensitive data regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulation, which prohibits non-U.S citizens from accessing that data. The Federal Information Security Management Act and the Federal Information Processing Standard. This comes on top of what Amazon already offers to its private customers, such as PCI DSS compliance.
Several government agencies, including NASA, are already using Amazon Web Services, but it seems the new offering is aimed at drastically increasing that number. It also likely indicates an upturn in public sector spending on cloud services, according to CNET’S Dave Rosenberg. govCloud is priced higher than other AWS services aimed for private sector customers.
VMware is another company that’s going after government agencies, and has seen some success in doing so. The Department of Veterans Affairs Acquisition Academy is using technology developed by the company and partner FedStore, while an unnamed U.S defense agency is levbaraging VMware View, according to a recent release.
Cloud adoption in the public sector is seeing acceleration, but security remains a concern. In particular, the launch of Office 365 in Europe was surrounded by concerns after Microsoft declared the U.S government can obtain access to European servers under the Patriot Act.
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
