Amazon Web Services has opened a new region of interconnected data centers specifically for the U.S. government and its various contractors.
Amazon’s cloud computing arm said Monday that its so-called GovCloud region is now operating live in an unspecified area on the East Coast. The new government cloud region comes seven years after Amazon’s first West Coast government cloud region debuted in 2011.
Unlike traditional data centers, cloud computing and big Internet companies like Microsoft and Facebook typically operate clusters of interconnected data centers that essentially act as one big facility.
Teresa Carlson, AWS vice president of the worldwide public sector, said that one of the reasons the company built a new government cloud was to let government agencies and their third-party contractors maintain duplicate copies of their data and apps. In the case that a problem occurs in one facility, the other data center facility can pick up the slack.
Having a second data center region will also reduce the latency, or delays, that might occur when East Coast federal agencies have to use Amazon’s cloud services from the West Coast, Carlson explained. She declined to say where the facilities are physically located, citing security reasons.
Amazon’s opening of a new government cloud highlights the efforts of big tech companies to score big federal contracts as the government attempts to modernize to newer IT technologies. For instance, Amazon built the CIA its own separate cloud data center region, and is in the process of bidding against companies like Oracle and Microsoft for a $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract with the Pentagon.
Carlson said that the new government cloud data center region is separate from Amazon’s bidding on the JEDI contract.
Some of Amazon’s competitors in selling on-demand computing resources to the federal government include Microsoft, IBM, and Google, said Adelaide O’Brien, International Data Corporation’s research director of government digital transformation strategies.
Although Amazon’s government cloud business is likely to be much smaller compared to its enterprise cloud business, Carlson said Amazon is building more government data center facilities to keep up with demand. She said the government cloud business has a compound annual growth rate of 185%, but declined to say from what number.
When Carlson first began pitching Amazon Web Services back in 2010 and 2011, she said that federal employees were unfamiliar with the online retail giant’s information technology business.