New AWS GovCloud Region Will Serve Government And Regulated Industries

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will open a new data centre region for its GovCloud platform in 2018 to add to the existing region launched in 2011 on the west coast of the US.

The new region will be situated somewhere on the east coast, giving government authorities and local organisations in highly-regulated industries a place to host their most sensitive data and regulated workloads in the AWS Cloud.

AWS GovCloud (US-East) will also provide businesses with additional options related to disaster recovery, along with access to redundancy, data durability and resiliency services.

GovCloud expansion

As with the existing GovCloud region, the east coast base will be designed to meet top US government compliance standards, such as International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), NIST standards related to cyber security and Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) requirements.

Several government agencies including NASA and the Department of Justice are already using the GovCloud platform to make use of the isolation and data protection capabilities required in the handling of highly sensitive data.

And the same is true for regulated industries such as financial services, where organisations have to meet strict levels of compliance whilst also wanting to benefit from the flexibility and cost-savings that the public cloud offer.

This is, of course, also a key issue for UK-based businesses, especially with stricter legislation on the horizon in the form of new Global Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

In other AWS news, the public cloud giant has also recently announced cloud capabilities for Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the general availability of AWS Greengrass, which allows customers to run compute, messaging data caching, and sync capabilities on connected devices.

It is also busy readying a new infrastructure region in Sweden as part of its quest for world domination and has expanded its services into call centres with the launch of AI-based service Amazon Connect.

Quiz: How much do you know about Amazon Web Services?