Cloud Computing for Defense
Securely enabling defense and national security missions with cloud computing
Adopting cloud computing is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage. Our nation’s warfighters deserve the most innovative and secure solutions at the tactical edge – whether on land, in air, or at sea. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud provides secure, scalable, and cost-efficient solutions that help agencies meet mandates, drive efficiencies, increase innovation, and secure mission-critical workloads across the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). That’s why the DoD trusts the cloud with the most tools, technology, and accessibility at the tactical edge.
Benefits
Most secure
AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. This is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with over 250 security, compliance, and governance services and features. AWS supports more than 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and provides over 40 services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6 for the AWS Secret Region for production workloads.
Proven reliability
AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure with 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world. No other cloud provider offers as many regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking.
Most functionality
AWS has significantly more services than other cloud provider with more than 175 fully featured services for a wide range of technologies. AWS also has the deepest functionality within those services.
Largest community of customers and partners
AWS has the largest and most dynamic community. The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes thousands of systems integrators who specialize in AWS services and tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) who adapt their technology to work on AWS.
Broadest customer adoption
For over 14 years, AWS has delivered cloud services to millions of customers around the world running a wide variety of use cases. With more than 6,500 government agencies and over 11,000 academic institutions using AWS, we have the most operational experience, at greater scale, of any cloud provider.
Fastest pace of innovation
Relentless innovation requires more than just a focus on product development. We work hard to adopt a “builder’s mindset” that encourages rapid experimentation. It’s that mindset—and the technology created by it—that will enable our government to continue to innovate to protect and support citizens and warfighters.
“The cloud on its weakest day is more secure than a client-server solution. It’s been nothing short of transformational. It has transformed our ability to build new capabilities.”
Sean Roche, Associate Deputy Director of Digital Innovation, CIA
AWS Public Sector Summit Keynote
Use cases
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Streamlined Data Transfer
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Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
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Data Analytics & Management
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Compliance
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Streamlined Data Transfer
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Streamlined data transfer
Kinesis Firehose ingests data to S3, which then holds the raw, pre-processed, and post-processed data as a data lake. Run queries using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Redshift Spectrum. Use Amazon QuickSight to visualize data to make informed decisions. If you are running machine learning (ML) workloads, you can use Spark ML, Python, and MXnet to run ML queries. Use the outcome of the analysis to increase targeting accuracy and optimize targeting algorithms.
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Machine Learning on AWS
AWS has the broadest and deepest set of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) services for your business. On behalf of our customers, we are focused on solving some of the toughest challenges that hold back ML from being in the hands of every developer.
Blog: Predictive Maintenance
Key to a successful predictive maintenance solution is getting access to the right information at the right time. Combining IoT and machine learning can enable real-time predictions, anticipate equipment failure or maintenance scheduling, and achieve higher levels of efficiency.
AI/ML Webinar Series
Our webinars help IT practitioners, CIOs, CTOs, CSOs, data scientists, and engineers with little-to-no AI/ML experience, find their best use case and build a proof of concept.
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Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
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Disaster recovery & business continuity
Unexpected events can have longstanding business and reputational impact, particularly for organizations that house complex systems. To help your systems become secure and redundant, AWS offers tools to build disaster recovery and business continuity protocols, so that you can protect your organization without incurring the expense of another physical site.
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On-demand Webinars
Data is your organization’s most strategic asset – making safeguarding it a priority. Federal agencies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and state and local governments must keep their data secure, available, and safe from threats, such as natural disasters and cyber attacks.
Ebook: Backup and Restore with AWS
This eBook provides high-level business benefits of backing up data to AWS, instead of using traditional backup strategies that involve maintaining tape libraries and/or secondary failover sites.
Video: Risk Mitigation Strategies in Disaster Recovery Planning
Learn how to build disaster resilience into every application for business continuity, security, and support for instant failover and high availability in disaster recovery scenarios.
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Data Analytics & Management
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Data analytics & management
With the most complete data management platform and numerous partner solutions, AWS can help optimize the entire lifecycle of your data, including collection, ingestion, processing, analytics, short-term storage, and archiving. We also provide sophisticated capabilities to support real-time streaming and analytics, petabyte-scale warehousing, business intelligence tools, and machine learning. Learn more about Data Analytics & Management.
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Data Lakes and Analytics on AWS
AWS-powered data lakes can handle the scale, agility, and flexibility required to combine different types of data and analytics approaches to gain deeper insights.
Blog: Analytics Without Limits: FINRA’s Scalable and Secure Big Data Architecture – Part 1
Before the cloud, fixed capacity and provisioning lead-times were getting in the way of the analytics. With AWS, we can now expand online storage seamlessly and scale compute dynamically to meet the demands of our analysts and data scientists and keep pace when market volumes spike.
Blog: Analytics Without Limits: FINRA’s Scalable and Secure Big Data Architecture – Part 2
In order to migrate to the cloud, we worked on overcoming a few initial questions: Is it secure enough? How will security and governance controls be implemented? And can we improve our security posture with cloud infrastructure?
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Compliance
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Automated compliance environment
AWS allows for rules-based, automated compliance. At the organizational level, you can create rules regarding how your AWS infrastructure can be provisioned and configured throughout your agency. When you are creating infrastructure for a particular project, you can create reusable templates that allow you to have a consistent environment for development, testing, production, and validation activities. Once deployed, AWS has tools to continually test, monitor, and log events that occur. You can use these tools to rapidly detect deviations from corporate policy and sound alarms when they occur.
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AWS Cloud Security
Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.
AWS Compliance
As with everything at Amazon, the success of our security and compliance program is primarily measured by one thing: our customers’ success. Our customers’ requirements drive our portfolio of compliance reports, attestations, and certifications that enable our customers to run a secure and compliant cloud environment.
Blog: Cloud Security Built for Government Missions
As evidenced by the full range of our Authorizations-To-Operate, third-party attestations, and certifications, the AWS Cloud provides government customers with the only one-stop shop to handle Public, For Official Use Only (FOUO), Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret workloads.
AWS GovCloud
AWS GovCloud (US) gives government customers and their partners the flexibility to architect secure cloud solutions that comply with: the FedRAMP High baseline, the DOJ’s Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy, U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Export Administration Regulations (EAR), Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) for Impact Levels 2, 4 and 5, FIPS 140-2, IRS-1075, and other compliance regimes.
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Featured content
Video Series: Immersion Learning Series for DoD
This learning series is for those who are embarking on their cloud journey or looking to brush up on the basics of the AWS Cloud as it relates to the Department of Defense.
Blog: The AWS Secret Region
With the launch of this new Secret Region, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.
Blog: Busting the Myth of Vendor Lock-In
Although more public sector organizations are adopting the cloud for mission-critical workloads, misconceptions about vendor lock-in still exist.
Webinar: Enabling the Warfighter: Bringing the Cloud to the Tactical Edge
Watch to hear perspectives from experts in government and industry and to learn about the cloud’s current and potential impact on warfighting capabilities.
Case studies
U.S. Defense Logistics Agency
The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency migrated applications to AWS GovCloud (US) to improve security, infrastructure stability, application performance, and efficiencies.
U.S. Navy
The U.S. Navy and SAP National Security Services (SAP NS2) migrated their largest SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system–72,000 users spread across six U.S. Navy commands–to the AWS Cloud.
U.S. Air Force
The U.S. Air Force is using AWS GovCloud (US) to securely extend sensitive workloads from the cloud to the tactical edge in support of the warfighter.
U.S. Special Operations Command
The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) leveraged AWS to automate processes with AI to enable sense making for the war-fighter.