Amazon Web Services announces a new ‘Secret Region’ that is designed to handle workloads of the US intelligence community

Amazon’s cloud services arm, Amazon Web Services has announced the introduction of a new AWS region that will be designed to take on the workloads of the intelligence community in the United States. This new region is named as ‘AWS Secret Region’ and it will run workloads with the “secret” security classification. [caption id=“attachment_4220557” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image: Twitter/@awscloud[/caption] This new cloud region is likely to complement AWS’s existing contract with the CIA and other agencies worth $600 million. This contract allows the security and intelligence agencies to run ‘Top Secret workloads’ on its cloud infrastructure as reported by TechCrunch. Amazon’s announcement comes a month after Microsoft announced a similar service in the form of ‘ Azure Government Secret’. Teresa Carlson, vice president for Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector added, “AWS now provides the US Intelligence Community a commercial cloud capability across all classification levels: Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret and Top Secret. The US Intelligence Community can now execute their missions with a common set of tools, a constant flow of the latest technology and the flexibility to rapidly scale with the mission.” [caption id=“attachment_4220551” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Image: Amazon[/caption] She went on to add, “The AWS Top Secret Region was launched three years ago as the first air-gapped commercial cloud and customers across the US intelligence community have made it a resounding success. Ultimately, this capability allows more agency collaboration, helps get critical information to decision makers faster, and enables an increase in our nation’s security.” The report points out that this new region is different from what CIA and other intelligence agencies did with AWS and Amazon GovCloud. The major difference between this new region and Amazon GovCloud is the fact that the air-gapped Top Secret Cloud is now available for all government agencies. It was limited to the intelligence agencies earlier.