CIA’s Amazon-Built Cloud Goes Live

August 1, 2014 Off By David

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Frank Konkel.

The Central Intelligence Agency is now officially an Amazon Web Services cloud consumer. Less than 10 months after a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge ended a public battle between AWS and IBM for the CIA’s commercial cloud contract valued at up to $600 million, the AWS-built cloud for the intelligence community went online last week for the first time, according to a source familiar with the deal.

The cloud — best thought of as a public cloud computing environment built on private premises — is yet far from its peak operational capabilities when it will provide all 17 intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services…

The timing aligns with public comments made by CIA Chief Information Officer Douglas Wolfe in June, though neither the CIA nor Amazon would confirm the cloud has come online. “Our goal is to make the IC cloud’s commercial services available to customers beginning in summer 2014, and we are on target to meet it,” a CIA spokesperson told Nextgov. “The services will be available to all intelligence community agencies.”…

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