Amazon gets clearance to provide more cloud services to Pentagon
FT.com By Barney Jopson 26/03/14
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/22a91a08-b504-11e3-9166-00144feabdc0.html
Amazon’s cloud computing business has received high-level security clearance from the Pentagon, paving the way for it to provide more services to the US government.
#Cloud computing is a growing part of the online retailer’s services business and #Amazon is making a big push to persuade government clients to switch their systems from old-fashioned in-house servers to its own data centres.
Amazon said on Wednesday that the Department of Defense had granted its eight-year old cloud computing business new authorisations after concluding that it met the Pentagon’s “stringent security and compliance requirements”.
(...) Some Department of Defense agencies, including the US air force and the navy, already use the Amazon cloud, but the latest authorisations will make it easier for other agencies to approve its use. Across the US government Amazon says more than 600 agencies use AWS services.
(...) Amazon faces competition in the cloud computing market from Google’s cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others.
This month the Pentagon rolled out a private cloud computing service of its own called MilCloud. It does not compete against commercial cloud providers and provides an extra level of security for sensitive and classified information, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency, which developed it.