AWS has announced a new top secret cloud region for classified government data.
The new Top Secret-West region is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret US security classification level; the highest security classification in the country.
The new region adds multiple availability zones geographically separated from AWS Top Secret-East; the company says the regions are more than 1,000 miles apart.
“With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the US defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions. In addition, they gain proximity to new geographically distributed workloads and mission users,” the company said.
The new region is accredited for security compliance under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Intelligence Community Directive (ICD 503) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 Revision 4.
AWS launched its first top-secret region, Top Secret East, in 2014. It launched the AWS Secret Region – to operate workloads up to the Secret US security classification level – in 2017.
The company said its classified Regions “meet the same high standards for reliability, availability, and durability as our other industry-leading AWS Regions.” This week AWS suffered a major outage at its Northern Virginia region, leading to widespread outages across a number of customers.