AMAZON

AWS Top Secret-West: The Secret Cloud for the US Government

Amazon's cloud division announced this week that it is expanding support for government classified workloads by creating a new AWS Top Secret-West cloud region. It will become the second region in the United States after Top Secret-East, enabling defense, intelligence and other community customers to deploy architectures with the highest levels of resilience and availability needed to fulfill critical national security missions.

AWS has not disclosed the location of the new “top secret” region, saying only that it will be located more than 1,000 miles from the first, which is located somewhere in northern Virginia. Both include multiple Availability Zones, allowing customers to deploy multi-region architectures, receive highly resilient services, and handle latency-sensitive data closer to their users.

Each Availability Zone consists of independent data centers (DPCs) with redundant power and network connections. Synchronous replication of data is performed between Availability Zones in one region and asynchronously with another region. Availability Zones provide greater resilience and lower application response times, which is difficult to achieve with a single data center.

In addition to Amazon, companies like Google, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft are vying for cloud computing contracts for government services. In November 2020, the CIA signed a multiple contract with them for a period of 15 years and worth tens of billions of dollars. However, as is the case with many other government requests, cloud providers will not gain much from them, but they will be able to attract other customers.

AVnews