Store Mission-critical Files in AWS GovCloud (US) with Amazon EFS – Now FedRAMP Certified

I’m super excited to share that Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) has achieved FedRAMP High provisional authorization in AWS GovCloud (US). With this achievement, U.S. government agencies can now easily and cost-effectively store sensitive files including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), sensitive patient records, financial data, law enforcement data, and other Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in Amazon EFS.

As we’ve mentioned before on the Storage blog, tens of thousands of customers are already benefiting from the simplicity, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that Amazon EFS provides. EFS launched in AWS GovCloud (US) late last year, and we’re proud to officially unblock highly sensitive, mission-critical workloads for government customers with FedRAMP High certification. You can read more about the FedRAMP High baseline in AWS GovCloud (US) here.

While customers have been using EFS for a wide variety of use cases, I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight two specific capabilities, given the benefits we see for government customers and their regulated applications. First and foremost, you can use EFS Lifecycle Management to automatically save money as access patterns change, by transparently moving less frequently used data into the EFS Infrequent Access storage class (EFS IA). EFS makes it super easy for government customers to get started in the cloud, by simply lifting-and-shifting workloads and without requiring you to change your applications. With Lifecycle Management enabled, you automatically save money as files naturally become accessed less over time, yet they remain fully accessible in the same file system namespace along with your actively used data. Also, we recommend AWS DataSync to quickly and easily power your migrations to the cloud and load data into Amazon EFS.

For government customers who are already well-established in the cloud and have gained familiarity with the breadth and depth of AWS services, you can also use EFS to store and access your files in a cloud-native way. As an example, along with the recent announcement of FedRAMP certification for EFS, we also announced FedRAMP certification for many other services, including the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). Many customers are using EFS to provide shared, scalable storage for containerized workloads, and we recently blogged about best practices for using EFS with containers.

We’re looking forward to see even more government agencies take advantage of EFS, now for more sensitive data and applications, with FedRAMP High authorization.