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 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
Security & Compliance
Security is our top priority at AWS. Nothing is more important to us than protecting your data and your privacy. That is why we work closely with customers to offer both a secure cloud-computing environment and innovative security services that satisfy the security and compliance needs of some of the most risk-sensitive organizations. Learn more about AWS Cloud security.
Achieve Missions Faster
Experimentation and collaboration drive innovation, and the cloud makes this practice readily accessible. Organizations are encouraged to embrace ideation and testing – and even failure. With the agility and speed of the cloud, teams can quickly build, experiment, and launch new services.
Speed up 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.
Lower Costs
AWS also makes many innovative services available at a fraction of the price of on-premises solutions. Our flexible pricing model allows for less waste and more focused investment on what agencies need now to achieve their mission, which is good for both government and taxpayers.
“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.
Featured content
Blog: The Cloud Evolution for Defense Agencies
Given the DoD’s diverse and global mission, cloud computing offers ideal qualities like pay-as-you-go pricing, scalability, security, and the ability to experiment.
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. Air Force
Small, highly empowered teams are breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in highly regulated, unclassified environments.
U.S. Army
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) worked with the U.S. Army to successfully migrate the Total Ammunition Management Information System (TAMIS) to AWS GovCloud (US).
USTRANSCOM
The United States Transportation Office (USTRANSCOM) has started to successfully migrate all of their applications to AWS.
U.S. Navy SPAWAR
Three federal agencies – the National Cancer Institute, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Navy SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific – discuss their journey, goals, and achievements related to their digital transformation efforts.
Defense Logistics Agency Upgrades LMS to the Cloud for Agility and Reliability
As the U.S. Department of Defense migrates more mission-critical workloads to the cloud, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) recently upgraded its training-delivery application and moved it from its on-premises data center into a commercial cloud environment.
The Navy Turns to AWS GovCloud (US) for Standardization and Security
By deploying CNIC N9 GovCloud, a centrally managed content delivery service adaptable to regional needs, the U.S. Navy was able to significantly reduce overall costs, decrease investment in hardware, increase security by reducing network attack surface, and centralize information and data governance.
Staying a Step Ahead in a Changing World: The AFSOC Story
By using AWS, the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command is able to save $3.5 million and serve more than 16,000 active-duty, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, and civilian personnel globally and securely.
NGA’s Open Collaboration and Public-Private Partnership
With a drastically changing technology landscape, Sue Gordon, Deputy Director, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), explains how we must all adapt to execute the mission. The NGA provides the content and context for the nation to know the truth, see beyond the horizon, and be able to act before events dictate.