CIA CIO calls AWS's cloud a "godsend"

The US Central Intelligence Agency's CIO Sherrill Nicely has called Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud infrastructure “a godsend” in terms of improving the agency’s security posture.

The CIA signed a US$600 million contract with AWS in 2013 to build a cloud infrastructure for the USA’s 17 intelligence agencies.

Speaking at an event hosted by Nextgov, Nicely said the cloud “has been a godsend for folks trying to implement systems quickly and for us to secure workloads better”, and said the agency is “very happy” with the implementation.

She said the CIA and other intelligence agencies are busily migrating their workloads off legacy infrastructure and into the cloud.

Nicely added that during initial negotiations, AWS shared internal information regarding what the company does to keep customers’ cloud data secure, and the CIA gave feedback on changes they would like to see implemented. AWS “took a lot of that to heart” and implemented improvements as a result.

Finally, she noted that AWS’s elastic computing infrastructure allows the agency to more quickly conduct cybersecurity audits on IT systems. With legacy hardware the systems would sometimes grind to a halt under the weight of the large volumes of audit data required.