CIA’s secret Amazon cloud ready to roll

cia headquarters

The Amazon Web Services-based cloud for the CIA is near completion, according to the CIA’s chief information officer (CIO).

On Wednesday, Doug Wolfe told a Cloudera industry gathering that the agency’s long-awaited AWS cloud has hit “final operational capability”  after 18 months of work, EnterpriseTech reported.

Amazon famously prevailed with its  bid for this CIA cloud contract in late 2012 when it beat out IBM even though it bid a higher dollar amount.  This $600 million deal was huge for AWS, which wants to show security- and compliance-conscious industries that its public cloud infrastructure can meet their special needs.

Since 2011, Amazon had already fielded GovCloud, a separate cloud region that meets special criteria so it can be used by government agencies. The CIA has additional requirements above and beyond that.

Wolfe also said the new cloud would be rolled out across 17 different intelligence agencies (news to me), and that the agency would have Cloudera’s enterprise data hub, running on the AWS service within months, according to the story.

 

You're subscribed! If you like, you can update your settings

Comment
Community guidelines
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
you are commenting using your account. Sign out / Change

Or comment as a guest

Be sure to review our Community Guidelines. By continuing you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.