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Amazon Picks Up Added Security Credentials

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has picked up another security accreditation from the federal government, which should allow it to further penetrate the public sector with its popular infrastructure services, as well as give it more credibility with businesses.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) last week gave Amazon the green light with its Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate level authorization and accreditation.

"The door is now open for a much wider range of U.S. government agencies to use AWS as their cloud provider," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "Based on detailed security baselines established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), FISMA Moderate certification and accreditation required us to address an extensive set of security configuration and controls."

The accreditation covers Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Virtual Private cloud services and their associated infrastructures, the company said.

Amazon's security and compliance framework already covered FISMA Low, PCI DSS Level 1, FIPS 140-2, ISO 27001 and SAS-70 type II, and is set up to comply with HIPAA regulations.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 19, 2011


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