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This week, the Defense Department granted the cloud computing giant a provisional authorization to host Impact Level 5 workloads, which are the military and Pentagon’s most sensitive, unclassified information.
“This further bolsters AWS as an industry leader in helping support the DoD’s critical mission in protecting our security,” the company said in a statement. “The AWS services support a variety of DoD workloads, including workloads containing sensitive controlled unclassified information and National Security Systems information.”
Already, DoD is using AWS to host sensitive, mission-critical workloads, including the operational control system for the Global Positioning System. The provisional authorization allows military customers an easier route to use AWS for a variety of other IT services.
In total, three commercial companies—AWS, IBM and Microsoft—are now able to host and store the military’s most sensitive unclassified data. AWS has expanded its defense business, it remains the dominant cloud service provider in the intelligence community by virtue of its $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. AWS’ C2S cloud hosts classified information for the 17 intelligence agencies.
Full article: Amazon Web Services can Now Host the Defense Department’s Most Sensitive Data (NextGov)
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