AWS starts offering a new region "Secret Region" for high security for US government agencies

ByMichelangelo Carrieri

Amazon's umbrella AWS is a new region for government agencies that manage highly confidential information on November 20, 2017Secret RegionWe announced.

Announcing the New AWS Secret Region | AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog
https://aws.amazon.com/jp/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new-aws-secret-region/

In AWS, a mechanism such as preventing delays in services is introduced by dividing the backbone that provides the service into areas called geographically distant regions. In the United States, "us-east-1" (Northern Virginia Eastern), "us-east-2" (Eastern Ohio, USA), "us-west- 1" (North West California USA) -2 "(Western Western Oregon), there are four regions, Japan has its own region" ap-northeast-1 "(Asia Pacific · Tokyo) is set.

AWS Global Infrastructure | AWS


Also, since 2011, there has been a region called "GovCloud" (us-gov-west-1) that can be used by administrative organs involved in the operations of the US government, each state, local government, and their contractors.

GovCloud - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
https://aws.amazon.com/jp/govcloud-us/


And this time a new "Secret Region" was announced. This region is operated exclusively for Government information intelligence "IC" (Intelligent Community) such as CIA (Intelligent Community), etc. Constructed from the level of designing a new architecture to realize high confidentiality required by IC It is said that it is done. This region provision is based on "Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract" which provides GovCloud as mentioned above, but non-IC government agencies not included in this contract can also use Secret Region I will.

As a result, the AWS has information on all levels of "Unclassified" managed by the IC (unclassified document), "Sensitive" (handling precaution), "Secret" (confidential document), "Top Secret" (highest confidential document) It will be the only operator to provide a dedicated region to government agencies dealing with. Although information of government agencies has been managed and operated on AWS services, it means that a mechanism with even higher security is born. John Edwards, CIA's Chief Information Officer (CIO), said "AWS Secret Region will be a key component of the IC multi-fabric cloud strategy."

Regarding the use of AWS by the US government, it is also clear that the Department of Defense monitored citizen's net posts and stored 1.8 billion logs on AWS.

Does the Pentagon monitor citizen's net post? Reveal with misconfiguration of AWS - ITmedia Enterprise
http://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/articles/1711/20/news056.html