The company also reported that to date more than 300 government agencies and 1,500 education institutions have deployed AWS -- which provides agencies and businesses with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud -- for a range of uses including big data analytics, high performance computing, Web and collaboration applications, and archiving and storage.
The new AWS GovCloud services include Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute instances, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon CloudWatch alarms.
AWS GovCloud is designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.
With initiatives such as the U.S. Federal Cloud First mandate and the European Cloud Partnership, government agencies and other organizations are looking for ways to quickly migrate new and existing business workloads to the cloud in a secure, compliant and cost-effective manner, according to Teresa Carlson, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector, AWS.
“With the new services and features added today in AWS GovCloud, public sector customers now have greater capabilities to rapidly design, build and deploy high-performance applications with AWS’s scalable, secure, low-cost platform,” Carlson said in a statement.
Hundreds of agencies are leveraging AWS today, the company says, including the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Recovery and Accountability Board, U.S. Department of the Treasury, European Space Agency, and the State of Washington.
