A decade-old risk led to ‘phenomenal partnership’ between AWS and the intel community

To many intelligence officials at the time, the C2S contract — which procured commercial cloud services on behalf of all 18 intelligence agencies — was considered risky, allowing top secret classified data and information onto AWS hardware for tasks like computing, storage and sharing.

Speaking last week at AWS’ re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the tech chiefs for both the CIA and National Security Agency made clear in rare public remarks that those risks a decade prior have more than paid off.

“A lot of people may not realize, but had it not been for the partnership with AWS that CIA took over 10 years ago — really the risk was on AWS, with [then AWS CEO] Andy Jassy saying that they were going to work with the government and work to bring the best-in-breed technology to the national security space — we would not be here today,” La’Naia Jones, chief information officer at CIA said. “And so it’s just been a phenomenal relationship looking at how fast we’ve been able to progress…We would not be where we are without AWS stepping in and stepping up and willing to take that risk over a decade ago.”

In the years since C2S, the intelligence community’s partnership with AWS has only increased. In 2020, the CIA awarded its multibillion-dollar “C2E” cloud contract to AWS and four other vendors — Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM — to compete for specific IC task orders. For much of the past decade, however, AWS was the only commercial cloud provider that met the intelligence community’s stringent requirements to host top secret classified data, giving it a leg up on competitors in the national security space. According to AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy, the company’s relationship with the CIA has made it a better cloud provider.

“For them and for us, this was uncharted territory,” Levy told Nextgov/FCW at AWS re:Invent. “This was something new for the CIA and this was something new for [AWS] at the time. And when we take a look back over those 10 years, it’s really benefited AWS in a sense that we’ve learned a lot about how to do things that are really hard and solve difficult problems and become a better provider. It’s been a very beneficial partnership.”

In addition to being one of four companies to serve Defense Department cloud customers through the multibillion-dollar Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, AWS also won the NSA’s $10 billion cloud contract internally dubbed “WildandStormy.” It’s a core piece of the spy agency’s once-secret plans to move its troves of data, including signals intelligence, to a commercial cloud provider. Little else is known about the contract, which the NSA publicly acknowledged for the first time last week.

“We are about three, maybe four years into a journey of moving our capabilities into the Amazon cloud,” NSA CIO Scott Fear said, speaking alongside his CIA counterpart. “We are building on the work that La’Naia [Jones] described and have been with AWS for over 10 years now. We are in the process of bringing online new data centers for our work.”

Both tech chiefs said the intelligence community is not only embracing cloud computing, but using the cloud as a means to enable both artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence tools.

“AI is now being looked at in every aspect and facet of, not just CIA, but really across the intel community,” Jones said. “We’re very fortunate and honored to play a key role to help lead that relationship and partnership with industry through C2E.”

The CIA is “looking at generative AI, not just from the business or operations,” Jones added, but also for the agency’s open-source enterprise. She also suggested generative AI could be used to improve the digital acumen of code developers.

“We’re looking at it for analysis, and it’s being used actively,” Jones added. “I don’t know if everyone realizes that we’re actually making use of the technologies, and so we just have to build upon that to even enhance it.”

Fear said the NSA is looking to cloud and artificial intelligence tools like large language models “as a means to do our mission better.” But beyond that, Fear said the NSA is hoping to use cloud to “lower the barrier of entry for all these new technologies,” which had traditionally been difficult to get into the NSA’s air-gapped and highly-secure architecture.

“It’s really about how do you build partnerships and integration with the industrial base,” he said. “How do you access billions of dollars’ worth of investment in technology that’s not just going to go buy something — that’s an integration — and with a company at a level we haven’t done before. It’s a very exciting new way for us.”

AWS’ position as the first commercial cloud provider to host classified data has also made it a sought-after partner for both startups and established companies looking to expand their software offerings in the national security space. Palantir, AI firm Anthropic and software behemoth Salesforce are just a handful of important companies that have chosen to partner with AWS, in part because it can deploy software at scale in air-gapped settings.

“We’re very proud and happy to announce that we are running on AWS’ top-secret region, accredited, and it’s truly amazing,” Bill Pessin, senior vice president for Salesforce National Security, told Nextgov/FCW in Las Vegas.

Salesforce sought AWS’ partnership years ago after running all its software in its own data centers and decided that, in order to grow its government business and “get to the markets that we wanted to be in, we realized we needed to go to public cloud,” Pessin said. Soon after, he said the company recognized the opportunity “to piggyback in parallel, and not only go to public cloud for Salesforce at large, which we now call Hyperforce, but also to partner with the government and with AWS and then airgap Salesforce on AWS.”  

Pessin said Salesforce’s decision to take a “cloud native approach” to air-gapping its software — partnering with a hyperscale cloud provider instead of a systems integrator to operate an on-premise version of their software — was the best decision for both the company and its customers.

“It was an inflection point for our company,” Pessin said.