Amazon Opens Service for Spies

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 6:08AM EST · Published Nov 21, 7:25AM EST

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Amazon Opens Service for Spies — © Thinkstock

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) means to help U.S. government intelligence agencies keep their secrets secret. Its Amazon Web Services has released a new service intended to ward off hacks that could expose confidential information.

According to the e-commerce and cloud company:

We are pleased to announce the new AWS Secret Region. The AWS Secret Region can operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. The AWS Secret Region is readily available to the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) through the IC’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with AWS. The AWS Secret Region also will be available to non-IC U.S. Government customers with appropriate Secret-level network access and their own contract vehicles for use of the AWS Secret Region. These contract vehicles will not be part of the IC’s C2S contract.

With the launch of this new Secret Region, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret. By using the cloud, the U.S. Government is better able to deliver necessary information and data to mission stakeholders.

[nativounit]

There is, of course, no reason to believe that the new service is “hack-proof.” Skilled hackers, working for themselves or foreign governments, have been able to breach security systems at both the federal government level and at large corporations. Even the National Security Agency has been hacked. By some accounts, the agency has been hacked at least four times in as many years.

Amazon is probably the world’s largest cloud company. It needs to keep an edge over smaller rivals led by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL). The global revenue from cloud services is well into the billions of dollars and growing quickly.

Whether AWS Secret Region can help Amazon’s competitive advantages will be based to a large extent on whether it is hacked.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.