Amazon announces the addition of the new region to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the AWS Secret Region. This is Amazon's second venture after AWS Top Secret Region that was developed for the U.S. government. AWS Secret Region has been designed explicitly for the intelligence community of the U.S. government.
The platform can be accessed through Intelligence Community Commercial Cloud Service (C2S) contracts and gives the government access to the large processing and data storage capabilities. Keeping the security in mind, the platform, though provides access to government, maintains a tight control over the access. The AWS Secret Region also will also be available to the non-intelligence community of the U.S. Government customers, but only with appropriate Secret-level network access and their contract vehicles for the use of the AWS Secret Region.
Secret Region will be evaluated and attributed for security compliance under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Intelligence Community Directive (ICD 503) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 Revision.
To talk about the capability of the platform, it can handle the enormous workload of the Secret U.S. security classification just by using an air-gapped region of Amazon's cloud. It offers the U.S. Intelligence Community a commercial cloud capability across all classification levels including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret and Top Secret. Moreover, it has enabled the U.S. Intelligence Community to implement their missions with the help of a standard set of tools, advanced technology and the ability to upgrade it with every mission.
