Amazon's top-secret computing service, first designed for the Central Intelligence Agency, is poised to pick up a new client, official documents show.
The National Ground Intelligence Agency, a military agency supporting US Army Intelligence, plans to procure and use Amazon's cloud service, according to an unclassified task order from last month.
“Migration to the Intelligence Community Information Technology Environment Cloud provides the opportunity to evaluate and potentially re-invent how army [military intelligence] delivers IT services,” the task order states.
Specifically, the agency will adopt the “C2S Cloud,” or Commercial Cloud Services, which the army says “is Amazon Web Services for the [intelligence community].”
The hit product, AWS, is a huge deal in American commercial IT circles. Amazon's massive server farms allow clients to purchase computing power on a “buy as you go” basis and scale up usage efficiently. The company describes cloud computing as “the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications and other IT resources.”
“When Amazon launches in your space, you're stupid if you don't get scared by that,” Emil Eifrem told the Wall Street Journal on Friday. Eifrem designed a graphing software suite to help AWS users analyze their data usage more than a year ago and virtually “defined the technology.” Amazon later asked him for help on a similar, in-house data tool before announcing that it would be available…
