CybersecurityU.S. intelligence community to begin using Amazon-developed cloud service

Intelligence community will share a secure Amazon cloud // Source: yjc.ir

At the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with a $600 million grant, Amazon Web Services have put the finishing touches on a secure cloud-computing system for all seventeen intelligence networks. The system is expected to revolutionize the way each agency functions with one another.

As Defense One reports, for the first time the new network will allow all agencies within the intelligence umbrella to access a variety of on-demand services and analytic abilities straight from the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA).

The cloud will operate behind the intelligence community’s (IC) firewall — serving as a public utility within a private sphere. The network will have a variety of on-demand services including analytics systems, storage, and additional computing power. Agencies will only pay for the services they use, leading to massive savings over time.

CIA Chief Information Officer Douglas Wolfe said at a public appearance that the agency sees it as “a tremendous opportunity to sharpen our focus and to be very efficient. We hope to get speed and scale out of the cloud, and a tremendous amount of efficiency in terms of folks traditionally using IT now using it in a cost-recovery way.”

In terms of security, the cloud “Will be accredited and compliant with IC standards. Security in the IC cloud will be as safe as or safer than security on our current data centers,” said an unnamed senior CIA official.

Over the next ten years, as Amazon introduces new innovation and improvements to available technology, the IC cloud will also be upgraded.

The plans for the project were laid out in the IC Information Technology Enterprise plan, which has been promoted by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and IC Chief Information Officer Al Tarasiuk. Given the at times risky nature of sharing information in this capacity, the move is seen as a radical departure from previous intelligence community procedure.

The decision to forego developing a service in-house was also of interest. One former intelligence official said, “The goal was, ‘Can we act like a large enterprise in the corporate world and buy the thing that we don’t have, can we catch up to the commercial cycle? Anybody can build a data center, but we purchase something more? We decided we needed to buy innovation.”

The CIA first submitted a request for proposals in mid-2012 and considered bids from Microsoft and AT&T, before the contract was ultimately awarded to Amazon. Industry sources such as Defense One see this new decision to “buy innovation” as a future trend in the IC for years to come.