Amazon Unveils New ‘Secret Region’ Cloud for Spies - Motherboard

Amazon is amazing, right? Their cloud is fast, big, and cheap. Their shop offers everything and delivers it quite fast to you. This week, Amazon Web Services announced something very interesting: “AWS now provides the U.S. Intelligence Community a commercial cloud capability across all classification levels: Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.” Yes, you read right — it seems like Amazon will be the responsible company for hosting U.S. Intelligence service’s Top Secret data. I’m pretty sure it’s not a good idea that government services start to fully rely on a company’s exclusive Cloud service with no option to easily switch to a competitor or their own alternative back again. Put it in relation to what Amazon is: Up to 70% of the internet traffic goes through the AWS Virginia datacenter, Amazon wants a camera and microphone in your bedroom, your living room and also a smart key of your flat or house, and it’s already impossible to not use AWS if you use the internet. What happens to the U.S. Intelligence community if this AWS secure cloud suffers from an outage as it happened this year? Can they still operate? What if it happens during an active investigation?