Amazon Web Services Gets Higher FISMA Accreditation

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure and IaaS provider arm of the e-retail megalith, has announced it’s been granted Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate Authorization and Accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration. In plain English, that means that the search giant can open its doors to a wider range of public sector customers.

“This accreditation covers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and the infrastructure upon which they run,” according to the official Amazon blog entry. To receive the FISMA Moderate seal of approval, AWS had to “develop, document and implement an information security system” for its offerings.

AWS was already in possession of the FISMA Low certification, but by moving up that ladder, it expands its appeal to government agencies — different branches have different certification needs, after all, and now those that require the Moderate level can take advantage.

Intriguingly, Amazon said its main avenue of connecting the U.S. Government with cloud services is by way of its solution provider and integrator partners:

Of course, URS-Apptis isn’t the only provider to get that BPA — CGI Federal is operating under similar terms.

The cloud represents a huge opportunity for public organizations of all sizes and all over the globe, and service providers such as AWS and CGI are ramping up their security and compliance efforts to match. Keep watching TalkinCloud for updates.