Amazon Web Services Earns ISO 9001 Certification

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had its fair share of success in a variety of markets and verticals, and now the public cloud provider is hoping a new designation will give it a significant boost in the life sciences and healthcare industries.

Amazon is claiming to be the first cloud services provider to achieve the ISO 9001 certification. According to Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services’ chief evangelist, “This certification allows AWS customers to run their quality-controlled IT workloads in the AWS cloud. It signifies that AWS has undergone a systematic, independent examination of our quality system. This quality system was found to have been implemented effectively and has been awarded an ISO 9001 certification as a result.”

Of course, ISO 9001 certification is likely to be of most interest to the life sciences and healthcare verticals, as they have an FDA-mandated obligation to operate a quality management program, Barr noted. With this certification, Amazon seems intent on targeting drug manufacturers, laboratories and firms conducting clinical trials.

It takes some effort to achieve any of the ISO certifications, but ISO 9001:2008 (its official name) is a standard around managing quality of products and services that includes eight principles organizations must first meet to get certified. They include:

The certification covers a variety of Amazon services within nine of its regions—US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), GovCloud (US), Europe (Ireland), South America (Brazil), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).