AWS GovCloud (US) Region – Government Cloud Computing

AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) framework adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regulations as well as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP^SM) requirements. FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. AWS GovCloud (US) has received an Agency Authorization to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) utilizing a FedRAMP accredited Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO).

Leveraging the HHS authorization, U.S. government agencies can evaluate AWS GovCloud (US) for their applications and workloads, complete their own authorizations to use AWS, and deploy systems into the AWS environment. Agencies can immediately request access to the "Amazon Web Services - AWS GovCloud (US) Region" FedRAMP package by submitting a FedRAMP Package Access Request Form using package ID "AGENCYAMAZONGC".

Workloads that are appropriate for the AWS GovCloud (US) Region include all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), including ITAR, as well as Government oriented publicly available data. Because the AWS GovCloud (US) Region is physically and logically accessible by US persons only and also supports FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, customers can manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with federal requirements.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides agencies and businesses with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. With AWS you can requisition compute, storage, and other services on demand, gaining access to a suite of secure, scalable, and flexible IT infrastructure services as your agency or business needs them. With AWS, you pay only for what you use, making AWS not only the most agile but also the most cost-effective way to deliver your applications.

The AWS GovCloud (US) Region uses 100% carbon-free power. Learn more about our use of sustainable energy sources.

Would you like to learn more about the AWS GovCloud (US) Region? Do you have questions and would like to talk to one of our Solutions Architects? We host weekly and monthly webinars set up to give you an introduction to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region and answer your questions. Learn More about AWS GovCloud (US) Region Webinars and Events.

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Use Cases for the AWS GovCloud (US) Region

AWS GovCloud (US) Region can be used to power a wide variety of IT applications. AWS government use cases include:

Enterprise Applications – For many Oracle, SAP and Microsoft Windows applications, reliability is critical. To ensure reliability, organizations and enterprises traditionally provision for peak demand and disaster recovery, which leads to management complexity and leaves resources idle. With AWS, you can improve reliability and lower your costs by utilizing our fault-tolerant Availability Zones and paying only for the resources you use.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Analytics - Many agencies and organizations are amassing large data sets that they could process to gain critical insights; however, they are confined by fixed resources that require them to wait for these insights. With AWS, you can easily spin up massive on-demand clusters of compute resources in minutes and quickly gain the information you need to effectively meet mission goals.

Storage and Disaster Recovery - As their volume of data continues to grow, organizations are struggling to add the capacity needed to meet their primary storage and backup requirements. With AWS, you can easily access durable, available, and US persons only controlled storage that can meet your data security requirements and scale with the needs of your organization.

Web Applications - Web applications have unique scalability requirements since user demand is often difficult to predict. With AWS, you can combine reserved resources for predictable workloads with on-demand resources for unexpected spikes, ensuring low costs and great application performance even during intense demand peaks. Due to the elasticity of our services, agencies can simply remove resources when the demand subsides, ensuring high asset utilization and cost-efficient web applications.


The AWS GovCloud (US) Region works with a wide range of system Integrators (SI) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who have the capability to support workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. These solution providers include, for example: Deloitte, Oracle, Adobe, CACI, ESRI, URS, GTSI, Smartronix, Appian, Accelera Solutions, Aquilent, BlueRiver IT, Intelligent Decisions, Leverage IS, Pegasystems, and Optimos. Other solutions providers are welcome to contact their AWS Partner Manager to be included.

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Amazon Web Services in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region

Compute & Networking

• AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premise to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between the AWS GovCloud (US) Region and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment.
• Amazon EC2 delivers scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud.
• Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define.
• Amazon EMR is a web service that makes it easy to process vast amounts of data using Hadoop.
• Amazon VPC lets you provision a private, isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.

Storage

• Amazon S3 provides a highly durable and reliable data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from any system connected to the Internet.
• Amazon EBS provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached storage that persists independently from the life of an instance.

Database

• Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed, high performance, NoSQL database service that is easy to set up, operate, and scale.
• Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks for you. Amazon RDS supports the MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle database engines.

Deployment & Management

• AWS Management Console Access and manage your services and resources in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region through a simple and intuitive web-based user interface. Login to the console.
• AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
• Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon SNS topics, and Amazon SQS queues.
• AWS IAM enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users.

Application Services

• Amazon SQS is a reliable, highly scalable message queue service that enables asynchronous messaging between distributed components in a system.
• Amazon SNS is a highly reliable and scalable system that provides developers the ability to publish messages from an application and deliver them to subscribers or other applications. Amazon SNS supports notifications via email, HTTP, and to SQS queues.
• Amazon SWF is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications. Whether automating business processes for procurement or task tracking applications, building sophisticated data analytics applications, or managing cloud infrastructure services, Amazon SWF reliably coordinates all of the processing steps within an application.

Support

• AWS Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel to help you build and run applications on AWS Infrastructure Services.

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Intended Usage and Restrictions

AWS will screen customers prior to providing access to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Customers must be “U.S. Persons”, not subject to export restrictions, and must comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement as well as the AWS GovCloud (US) Region Addendum.