But now, as Amazon tries to woo these picky customers, it’s trying to replicate some of the perks that come with dedicated, on-premises hardware. That’s what the new CloudHSM service is about. Traditionally, a Hardware Security Module is a dedicated, hardened box for storing keys and running cryptography. Amazon says it can bring that dedicated security to its customers within its infrastructure.

.

In a Tuesday night blog post, Amazon said CloudHSM:

“brings the benefits of HSMs to the cloud. You retain full control of the keys and the cryptographic operations performed by the HSM(s) you create, including exclusive, single-tenant access to each one. Your cryptographic keys are protected by a tamper-resistant HSM that is designed to meet a number of international and US Government standards including NIST FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria EAL4+.”

Each CloudHSM provisioned for the customer incurs an upfront, one-time $5,000 fee and then an hourly rate of $1.88 per hour or $1,373 per month. Pricing is  here.

Bringing on-prem perks to public infrastructure

Amazon has made progress in offering more enterprise-grade cloud capabilities with its GovCloud services and Virtual Private Cloud capabilities. But still, even some of the biggest AWS customers will only put parts of their workloads on the Amazon cloud. The mission-critical goodies stay on premises or on private clouds.

That’s why Amazon has to get more acclimated with private cloud capabilities — observers say one reason that AWS might be building a private cloud for the CIA, as has been reported, is to prove its credibility there.  And that’s why we’ll be seeing more services like this CloudHSM service.

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Probably the biggest news of  the week was a Federal Computer Week report that public cloud leader Amazon is building a private cloud for the CIA. Citing unnamed sources, the story put the worth of the contract at about $600 million for 10 years. What was unclear — since no one is speaking officially — is if this completely separate from Amazon’s existing Govcloud, although that appears to be the thinking.

As the exec of one cloud competitor put it — this shows that Amazon will, for the right price, get into the private cloud business.

CIA spokespeople would not comment; Amazon did not respond to request for comment. Asked last week at GigaOM’s Structure Data event about the report, CIA CIO Ira “Gus” Hunt said he could not comment now but “maybe someday.”

A bad week for cloud-based services

The week started off rough for many Google Drive users who reported ttheir service was down. As Engadget put it, if there’s ever a time you don’t want your shared documents to go inoperable it’s Monday morning. There were additional intermittent troubles with the cloud storage system for two days.

On Wednesday, it was LinkedIn’s turn to flake out. The professional social networking site was down for about 45 minutes over a two-hour period, according to InfoWorld.

Not to be an apologist for cloud services — God knows I was ticked off by the problems with Google Drive last week –but it helps to remember how many times on-premises applications go awry.

My last employer ran an email system from a huge vendor. And we had multiple multi-day outages every year. I’m sure the vendor (it’s in the great northwest and is now trying to forklift its users to cloud ) would probably blame the implementation, the on-site admin guys would beg to differ. Bottom line, however, was that the poor schmuck end-users couldn’t get their mail. Moral of the story? Technology can fall down no matter how it’s delivered.

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For the CIA, Hunt said, there are three lines of “business” that are required: to collect information on America’s adversaries, to produce timely analysis, and to conduct covert action based on that analysis. All three of these jobs rely on understanding and interpreting increasing volumes of data, he said — not just from human beings and the vast quantities of social data that come from Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, but also from devices and the growing field of smart machines and sensors.

As all of those forces combine to generate more information, the CIA’s analysts not only have to sort through it all somehow, but they need to be able to combine data in ways that they may not even know they require until the moment arrives where they need a specific kind of information, said Hunt. That means the agency needs to develop algorithms and tools that have some intelligence of their own built into them, so that analysts can sort through data in the same way they build an Excel spreadsheet.

That day isn’t here yet, the CIA official said, but it is coming. And just as Google and other companies are trying to find smarter and smarter ways of filtering the world’s information, so is the CIA, using many of the same tools and technologies — it is just doing so for a different purpose.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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The report, as you might expect, doesn’t name its sources, but contends that Amazon will help build private cloud infrastructure that will enable the CIA to “keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA’s previous cloud efforts.” The contract is for up to $600 million over the next 10 years, according to FCW, which said neither Amazon nor the CIA would comment.

A CIA spokesman, as expected, declined comment saying: “As a general rule, the CIA does not publicly disclose details of our contracts, the identities of our contractors, the contract values, or the scope of work.”

The news, if true, is striking because it would show AWS, the largest public cloud provider, building an actual private cloud, observers said.

A collaboration like this makes sense for the CIA, given the U.S. government’s big “cloud first” initiative, which holds that the use of cloud computing technologies will save money and make government more responsive and flexible to its constituencies. And it would give Amazon a test bed to show — at least within the tight-lipped intelligence community — that it can build mission-critical and super secure private clouds for their use.

Amazon, as well as some legacy IT players,  has struggled on that whole private cloud front. Amazon Web Services launched Virtual Private Cloud capabilities four years ago and last week said it is broadening their use. It also hosts GovCloud, which is cordoned off from the rest of AWS, for government accounts.

For what it’s worth, Amazon’s biggest and oldest data center farm, US-East, is in Ashburn, Virg., and it is reportedly expanding its presence there with another huge data center farm. The CIA is based about 20 miles away in Langley, Virg.

I will update this story if I hear back from Amazon and this is something we’ll be sure to ask  Ira “Gus” Hunt,  CTO of the Central Intelligence Agency, when he speaks Wednesday at GigaOM’s Structure Data event in New York. I’m betting he keeps mum.

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“I want you to remember that Cisco puts the groceries on your table every two weeks, not Brad Reese or other Slander Sheet Journalists. That you disrespected everyone else at Cisco. Now I know you do not have it in you to stand up and admit what you did, so I will now make you my “hobby.” Ask around you will find out that I like to work on my hobbies.”

What a delightful work environment.

I chatted with Woolsey over the phone Monday afternoon, and we discussed his move to Lux and his energy passions, from a flex fuel mandate to smart grid security.

On Hopping Over to Lux

Woolsey said there were a couple of reasons for his move from VantagePoint Venture Partners to Lux Capital. First, Lux is based in New York, and Woolsey told me he has spent more and more of his time on the East Coast, teaching a class on energy at Yale, and two of his sons also live in New York City.

Woolsey also told me he liked the way Lux Capital has been focusing more on early stage energy companies. “They are very smart and quite interested in black swans. As am I.” said Woolsey, referring to the idea of very disruptive technologies and events that are game changers. He also noted the group was young and passionate, “I think everyone is young enough to be one of my kids,” he joked. (Woolsey is 69 years old).

Lux Capital invests across technologies, and has backed cleantech firms including Transphorm, Siluria, Crystal IS, and Kurion. Woolsey said he could also look outside of energy, and at sectors like security for IT, and biotech.

His Energy Ambitions

Woolsey discussed a variety of his cleantech passions with me in the interview. Those range from smart grid security — which Woolsey said most utilities aren’t paying enough attention to yet — to his support of a federal mandate for all vehicles to be made “flex fuel,” or able to run on biofuels. Oil as a transportation fuel is a monopoly, and giving biofuels an entry into the market is a way to break that monopoly, said Woolsey.

Not surprising given his CIA roots, Woolsey is bullish on technologies that can create energy security (reducing our reliance on Middle East oil), and he’s broadening his scope of cleantech firms outside of those that can reduce carbon emissions. He is interested in overall sustainability, pollution reduction and environmental technologies, not just climate change.

In terms of his next investments with Lux, Woolsey said he’s looking at multi-junction solar cells, ceramic batteries, the next generation of batteries after lithium-ion, nanotechnology and energy storage, and overall what is happening with material science and energy. The change in material science for something like solar might not be as dramatic as Moore’s Law, but it’s getting close, said Woolsey.

Image courtesy of JoeinSouthernCA and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

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Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group and its volunteers, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their production meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. In a blog post on the Wikileaks site, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the spying “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.”

Wikileaks believes the surveillance campaign is driven in part by the fact that it has obtained “a classified military video showing civilian kills by U.S. pilots” in Afghanistan. The group has said that it plans to release details about the video in a press briefing on April 5. In the blog post, Assange alleges that a Wikileaks volunteer was recently detained by police on a “wholly insignificant matter” and was shown photos of Assange outside the Icelandic Fish & Chips shop in Reykjavik, where a production meeting had been held to review the bombing-run video. Wikileaks later described this incident on its Twitter feed, saying, “We have been shown secret photos of our production meetings and been asked specific questions during detention related to the airstrike.”

In another Twitter message, the group said, “If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film.” Assange also says in the blog post that after taking a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen to speak at an investigative journalism conference, the group got a tip that they were under surveillance and checked the records for the flight (he doesn’t say how this was accomplished) to find “two individuals, recorded as brandishing diplomatic credentials, checked in for my flight…under the name of ‘US State Department.’ The two are not recorded as having any luggage.”

According to the Wikileaks blog post, there are a number of possible reasons for the U.S. government to be spying on the group, including:

• the classified film “revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S. general, David Petraeus.”
• the release of “a classified 32 page U.S. intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks”
• the release of “a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the UK over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.”
• pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic “oligarchs”

Assange says that Wikileaks has been the subject of a number of suspicious government-related spying attempts, intimidation and harassment over the years, including what he describes as the assassination of two human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March and an “armed attack on my compound there in 2007,” as well as an attack by Chinese computers on Wikileaks servers in Stockholm after the site published photos of murders in Tibet. He also says that a Wikileaks member was “ambushed” in a Luxembourg parking garage by a “James Bond” character.

Wikileaks has recently been raising money to continue its efforts, and has also been working with members of the Icelandic government to try and create an “information haven” in that country.

Post photo courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver_2000, thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user practical owl

While social networking in the office may foster community, there’s also a chance it could lead to better enterprise technology down the road. Investor Dave McClure yesterday declared that he wanted big players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to take his data and use it to build helpful applications. An example of this concept would be the evolution of the Twitter network. The micromessaging site opens up most of its data to developers, who in turn build applications on top of the platform that offer features not found on Twitter.com.

For $79, get more with Social Media in the Enterprise, by Rachel Happe, along with dozens of other reports.

In the same vein, if tech companies were able to glean data on how workers interact with one another on social networks while in the office, this could spur ideas for future enterprise-focused social-networking applications that aim to facilitate communication and increase productivity and efficacy. Some enterprise social-network applications are already popping up, such as Yammer, an enterprise version of Twitter, and both Oracle and IBM have similar offerings called OraTweet and BlueTwit.

“While a job may be regarded as an economic transaction, the human brain thinks of the workplace as a social system,” Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell said yesterday.

And if corporate IT companies still aren’t convinced of the value of social-networking data, they could take a note from the CIA, which invested in a software firm that monitors social media activity on sites like Twitter and YouTube.

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Barry Lynn, the chairman and CEO of cloud computing provider 3tera Inc. in Aliso Viejo, Calif., said a typical environment may have one systems administrator for every 75 physical servers. In contrast, a cloud-based environment may have just one administrator for every 500 servers or more.

The CIA has “seen a significant amount of pushback, slow-rolling [and] big-process engineering efforts to try to build another human-intensive process on top of enterprise cloud computing,” said Jill Tummler Singer, the CIA’s deputy CIO. “It will take us a good long while to break that.”

A reason the cloud is becoming more prevalent and cost-effective is because we require more and more compute resources every year to keep up with our demand for data. So even as virtualization allows for better CPU utilization, we still need more CPU, more memory and more bandwidth. Eventually, we would have run out of people to manage that complexity under older IT models. That’s no comfort to those who will be pushed out of their jobs as cloud computing is adopted by enterprises and governments, but it’s a similar cycle that happens when the economics and delivery model of an entire industry are upended. Just ask the newspaper industry.

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