8 Federal Agencies that You Didn’t Know Are in the Public Cloud

You probably already know that the U.S. intelligence community relies heavily on Amazon Web Services. In fact, the CIA recently announced an expansion of its use of the AWS cloud. But did you know that the Intelligence community has lots of company? As recently reported in The Federal Times, here are seven other ways the Feds already are using – or plan to use – the public cloud.

• NASA’s main website, along with all its other public-facing sites and the majority of its applications, are hosted on AWS. In fact, it recently was announced that thousands of NASA’s Earth images will be made available on AWS to benefit governmental climate research initiatives.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses AWS to compute big data sets for some of its programs and investigations.
• Health and Human Services (HHS) has consolidated multiple legacy email systems and migrated all its email to Office 365, running on Microsoft Azure.
• The Treasury Department was the first to use the public cloud for hosting its website back in 2010, and it continues to do so today.
• The Department of Labor will host its ERISA website on a public cloud next year.
• NOAA will adopt a public cloud infrastructure (IaaS) next year in an effort to make its data and resources widely available.
• FINRA currently is migrating its big data processing to the AWS public cloud and anticipates annual savings of up to $20 million from the move.

As the enhanced performance capabilities and financial benefits of the public cloud continue to grow, so too will the government’s reliance on industry leaders such as AWS and Microsoft Azure to provide them with secure cloud environments.

Blue Sentry is an advanced-tier Amazon Web Services (AWS) consulting partner specializing in application and data migrations, expert managed services and virtual desktops. Blue Sentry serves clients globally, with operations in North Carolina and South Carolina.