Category: AWS GovCloud (US)

There may be use cases where customers must orchestrate actions spanning AWS GovCloud (US) and standard AWS partitions. The common reasons customers may need to invoke AWS services in a standard account from an AWS GovCloud (US) account (or vice versa) include: cross-domain applications, feature parity, and if the AWS service doesn’t exist in AWS GovCloud (US). In this blog post, learn how to navigate these scenarios.

AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) provides administrators with a simple way to manage identity and access (IAM) across numerous AWS accounts. IAM Identity Center is available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, enabling customers to simply manage access to numerous AWS accounts in their AWS GovCloud (US) organizations. In this blog post, learn four different architecture patterns for providing an organization’s AWS users with access to both standard and AWS GovCloud (US) accounts using IAM Identity Center that can help minimize administrative overhead and simplify the user experience.

Modern applications built using microservices architectures improve customer experience by dramatically reducing the risk of failures in a web application. In this blog post, we present a sample AWS reference architecture of a microservices application built using an architecture framework based in AWS GovCloud (US), which can help support adherence to a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High Baseline.

In mid-February of 2022, the US federal government began planning the return-to-office after the COVID-19 pandemic. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) Tax Division needed to quickly build and launch a telework authorization application by April 1, which would help their more than 500 attorneys, paralegals, and administrative personnel request a hybrid work arrangement—all while keeping sensitive information compliant and secure. To do this, the DOJ Tax Division worked with AWS to build an enterprise-level telework approval application in less than two months, before the Division’s re-entry in mid-April of 2022.

In July 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released a cloud native access point (CNAP) reference design that follows zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles and provides a new approach to access mission owner (MO) applications. The DoD’s reference design discusses four core capabilities of CNAP: authenticated and authorized entities (C1), authorized ingress (C2), authorized egress (C3), and security monitoring and compliance enforcement (C4). In this blog post, we walk through how to establish the C2 component via a virtual internet access point (vIAP) with AWS. The proposed architectures can reduce operational cost and management overhead, while improving the accessibility, resiliency, and security of mission owner applications.

This blog post explores the options US public sector customers and their business partners should evaluate when selecting an AWS partition. We discuss the differences between AWS GovCloud (US) and the AWS standard partition and how to decide which partition may be the best match for your organization’s security, compliance, and availability needs.

Increasingly, AWS customers are operating workloads both in AWS GovCloud (US) and standard AWS Regions. Dependencies between workloads, changing data controls, or enrichment of data across multiple data levels are examples of business needs that may require moving data in and out of AWS GovCloud (US). In this blog post, I explain how to move data between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets in the AWS GovCloud (US) and standard partitions.

As public sector customers find increasing need to move data between the AWS GovCloud (US) partition and the standard partition, they need tools to help them lower their operational burden. In this blog post, I walk through how to use AWS DataSync to move data on network file system (NFS) shares between the two partitions.

AWS Top Secret-West is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret U.S. security classification level. The new Region adds multiple Availability Zones geographically separated from AWS Top Secret-East. With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions.

Ten years ago, the federal government was only just beginning to adopt cloud computing services. In the early days, there were concerns about how much cloud services would cost and whether they’d be secure enough for sensitive government data. In listening to our government customers, we heard their concerns about cost and security. They also needed to innovate ahead of demand, and required a highly secure and compliant infrastructure to do it. That’s why we launched AWS GovCloud (US) in 2011.