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"Amazon on Tuesday announced the launch of GovCloud, its cloud services \"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.\"\nAmazon's move to offer more secure, government-compliant cloud services is an investment towards the continued adoption of cloud services by government agencies.\nAmazon Web Services (AWS) Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote on AWS's blog that more than 100 federal, state, and local government agencies are already using other Amazon Web Services products, hinting at the importance of Amazon's decision to develop government-specific services.\nBarr noted that the U.S. Treasury's Recovery Accountability and Transparency board and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory both use the company's cloud services, for example.\nAWS GovGloud is compliant with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data. The regulations are put in place to make sure that only U.S. citizens and permanent residents can access stored data, both logically and physically.\nIn order to gain access to GovCloud, government agencies need to sign an AWS GovCloud (US) Enterprise Agreement. \"Government contractors, software integrators, and service providers with a demonstrated need for access\" may also apply, but must meet certain ITAR requirements.\nAmazon CTO Werner Vogels addressed GovCloud's future expansion in a blog post:\n\"As the name of the region already suggests, we do not envision that over time GovCloud will address only the needs of the U.S. Government and contractors. We are certainly interested in understanding whether there are opportunities in other governments with respect to their specific regulatory requirements that could be solved by a specialized region.\"\nMicrosoft and Google also offer cloud services that meet strict federal requirements.\n[via: InformationWeek]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/08/17/amazon-govcloud/>