Amazon Launches a Cloud Service For US Intelligence Agencies (cnbc.com)

Amazon Web Services on Monday introduced cloud service for the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community. From a report: The launch of the so-called AWS Secret Region comes six years after AWS introduced GovCloud, its first data center region for public sector customers. AWS has since announced plans to expand GovCloud. The new Secret Region signals interest in using AWS from specific parts of the U.S. government. In 2013 news outlets reported on a $600 million contract between AWS and the CIA. That event singlehandledly helped Amazon in its effort to sign up large companies to use its cloud, whose core services have been available since 2006.

Comments

Re:Worst idea EVER

[EndlessNameless]

People have started using terms like "own cloud" or "on-site cloud" to describe infrastructure services that are provisioned internally. Yes, this is stupid and pointless. Yet here we are.

Your typical internal cloud will have hardware, hypervisor, and management stack all provided and supported by a single vendor. Sometimes they will certify hardware and provide support for whatever you build.

They basically took the old mainframe business model, broke it out onto gobs of x86 servers, and repackaged it as something new. Now you run your applications on a VM or in a Docker container instead of an LPAR.

So, yes, local cloud is pure marketing bullshit. But it does refer to something different (and more secure) than regular cloud services.