person:barney jopson

CIA expands spy work through Amazon cloud | Financial Times Barney Jopson, 24 June 2014
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/10e229b8-fbbd-11e3-ad9b-00144feab7de.html

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The US spy agency already has a $600m contract in place with #Amazon – that IBM challenged unsuccessfully in the courts – under which the e-commerce group will set up and manage a private cloud computing service based on #CIA premises.

«Federal Court Rules for Amazon in CIA ’Cloud’ Contract Dispute With IBM »
▻http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579122120530360230

Stephen Schmidt, AWS’s chief information security officer and a former Federal Bureau of Investigation official, did not talk about security arrangements with the CIA, but described Amazon’s general approach as “security through obscurity”.

Most AWS employees knew which countries their data centres were in, but very few knew their physical addresses. “Does our staff member need to know that information to do their job? If they don’t, they don’t get access to it,” he said.

#silicon_army

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.

#silicon_army