As readers know, we’ve been tracking on the wikileaks cables (and I highly recommend WikiRiver to do that!). One of the things that came up early on in this story was news that Amazon had kicked Wikileaks off of its Web servers (with Paypal and Visa later following suit). Wikileaks tweeted the following response: “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”
Buried in the deluge of news about Wikileaks was this post by Dave Winer (who created WikiRiver) “US govt a big user of Amazon web services.” Turns out the US government does a large and growing amount of business with Amazon Web Services including Web and application hosting, backup and storage, and high performance computing.
Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services, entitled “Amazon Web Services Year in Review.” It contained a paragraph, quoted below, that explains how their government business grew in 2010.
“Government adoption of AWS grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government’s cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA, and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS. To learn more about how AWS works with the federal government, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/federal/.”
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