Amazon Web Services Achieves FedRAMP Compliance for AWS GovCloud (U.S.) and All U.S. Regions

Amazon Web Services Achieves FedRAMP Compliance for AWS GovCloud (U.S.) and All U.S. Regions

Achievement recognizes suitability of AWS to run sensitive government applications and meet security and compliance mandates

U.S. Department of the Navy, U.S. Department of the Treasury, NASA, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Recovery.gov, and over 300 U.S. government agencies are using AWS to save money, drive research and development, and increase innovation globally

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May. 21, 2013-- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced AWS GovCloud (U.S.) and all U.S. AWS Regions have received an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements at the Moderate impact level. FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. With this distinction, AWS has demonstrated it can meet the extensive FedRAMP security requirements and as a result, an even wider range of government customers can leverage AWS's secure environment to store, process, and protect a diverse array of sensitive government data. Leveraging the HHS authorization, all U.S. government agencies now have the information they need to evaluate AWS for their applications and workloads, provide their own authorizations to use AWS, and transition workloads into the AWS environment. To learn more about the AWS and FedRAMP compliance, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/.

More than 300 U.S. government agencies already use the wide array of AWS services to be more innovative, agile, and cost-efficient, said Teresa Carlson, AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector. Today most government computing systems require built-to-order platforms and applications to meet government security and compliance requirements, which involve time-consuming and costly evaluations. With this FedRAMP compliance, agencies can now utilize a streamlined process from AWS when moving applications to the cloud to meet their unique business and mission requirements.

The FedRAMP requirements raise the security bar for the agencies, results in uniform evaluations, and will provide government entities with immediate benefits of using the AWS Cloud, said Stephen Schmidt, AWS Chief Information Security Officer.

The Agency granting the ATO and filing with the FedRAMP repository is HHS. HHSs authorization of Amazons cloud services using FedRAMP requirements ensures the security of government data and paves the way for other agencies in using secure cloud services, said Matthew Goodrich, FedRAMP Program Manager. Amazon and HHS have demonstrated that cloud providers can meet the FedRAMP requirements in addition to the provisional authorizations granted by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board. Other agencies can leverage this authorization, potentially saving the Federal government hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating redundant security authorizations of Amazons environment.

HHS worked closely with the FedRAMP program office and AWS to achieve FedRAMP compliance. Utilizing the FedRAMP templates, HHS was able to maintain security requirements while achieving economies of scale, said Kevin Charest, HHS Chief Information Security Officer. FedRAMP promoted the trust, transparency, collaboration, and commitment necessary between cloud service providers and Federal agencies to comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA). HHS is pleased to be one of the first Federal agencies to go through the FedRAMP process, and to issue an Agency FedRAMP ATO. Our collaborative approach allowed all of HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVS) to leverage that ATO and thereby reduce duplicative efforts, inconsistencies, and cost inefficiencies associated with current security authorization processes.

With today's announcement, all agencies have an efficient way to run their FedRAMP required workloads on AWS. Agencies can immediately request access to the AWS FedRAMP package by submitting a FedRAMP Package Access Request Form and begin moving through the authorization process to achieve an ATO using AWS.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazons expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. Amazon Web Services offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover an

LINK:	http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&...
	See more stories from phx

Most recent headlines