Sources say Amazon scored a multi-million dollar contract with the CIA
FCW, a federal IT blog, reported yesterday that its sources confirmed that the CIA has inked a deal with Amazon, agreeing to a cloud computing contract “worth up to $600 million over 10 years.” These sources suggested to FCW that Amazon Web Services will help the intelligence agency build a private cloud network so that it can “keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA's previous cloud efforts.”
FCW also reports that the CIA's IT department has outlined efforts to promote "greater integration, information sharing, and information safeguarding through a common (intelligence community) IT approach that substantially reduces costs." The blog points out that comments such as these imply that there may be some changes coming to the way the CIA and other intelligence agencies share data—a marked departure for the isolated private clouds that the CIA is known be using presently.
