Tag: AWS Secret Region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the launch of AWS Marketplace in the AWS Secret Region, an expansion of the AWS Marketplace for the US Intelligence Community (ICMP) program. With this announcement, intelligence community customers now have access to 30 ISVs and 170 products in the AWS Secret Region, an air-gapped cloud accredited to support workloads up to the Secret US security classification level.

AWS Top Secret-West is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret U.S. security classification level. The new Region adds multiple Availability Zones geographically separated from AWS Top Secret-East. With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions.

For defense, speed is important—speed to capabilities, speed to delivery, and speed to service. To deliver at the pace required of the US Navy, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC PAC) leveraged the AWS Cloud to accelerate development of new features for the nation’s warfighters and to help address compliance at every stage of their cloud journey.

In June 2019, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC PAC) awarded AWS the first Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) in the US DoD for DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide IL-6 cloud services. This BPA allows for Navy customers to bring the benefits of commercial cloud to Secret workloads. In 2020, NIWC PAC made available the first AWS Secret Region IL-6 environment available for both internal customers residing on the NIWC PAC Secret Wide Area Network (SWAN) and external DoD and U.S. Department of the Navy customers. To support external customers, NIWC PAC deployed SkyDesk, a Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution that allows any SIPRNet terminal to connect and access the NR&DE IL-6 Cloud.

In November, with the launch of the AWS Secret Region, we achieved a Provisional Authorization (PA) for Impact Level 6 (IL6) workloads from the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the IT combat support organization of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The PA was recently updated to add 11 new AWS services. A service catalog for the Region is available through your AWS Account Executive.

The shift in technology and move to the cloud is not like any other in our lifetime, and the speed of innovation is happening much faster than anyone anticipated. Cloud is the new normal. Every industry and all levels of government—including the U. S. federal government—are utilizing the cloud for their most complex, innovative, and mission-critical projects.