Amazon-CIA Deal Would Fit Intel Community Strategy

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A report that the CIA has turned to Amazon to build and manage a private cloud computing environment for the agency is consistent with the IT strategy outlined by intelligence officials over the past two years.

The CIA declined comment on the report by government tech trade publication FCW that the Central Intelligence Agency has agreed to a multi-year deal with Amazon to help the CIA build a private cloud computing infrastructure, nor did Amazon respond to InformationWeek by publication time.

However, such a deal aligns with plans, publicly discussed by the CIA and Intelligence Community (IC) officials over the last two years, to bring commercial cloud computing technology and methodologies inside IC firewalls.

"As a general rule, the CIA does not publicly disclose details of our contracts, the identities of our contractors, the contract values or the scope of work," a CIA spokesperson told InformationWeek. The CIA also offered no comment on whether the agency is, more broadly, integrating or planning to integrate public cloud computing technology into the CIA's own private cloud computing infrastructure.

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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said only in response to a similar query that it plans to use "cloud technologies" as part of the broader IC enterprise IT strategy, and that such plans would involve "leveraging partnerships with industry partners."

An effort to work with large public cloud computing vendors to bring their technology in-house squares with past statements by IC officials about the cloud computing plans of the CIA and the IC. Those statements indicate that the IC has been working toward something similar to the deal reported by FCW, which FCW estimated at 10 years and as much as $600 million.

The idea of working with a public cloud computing vendor might have first publicly surfaced in October 2011, when CIA CTO Gus Hunt said at InformationWeek Government's GovCloud event that the CIA was looking to work with vendors to bring their public cloud computing environments inside IC firewalls.

Hunt said at the time that he was looking to "work with commercial cloud vendors to bring, inside our world at the classified level, some level of the efficiencies and scales that they have developed outside." Hunt added that vendors had been receptive to the idea.

Days before the GovCloud event, Hunt spoke about the CIA's cloud computing plans at Amazon's AWS Gov Summit conference, though, at that event, he made no mention of bringing Amazon technology inside the CIA.

In May 2012, U.S. Intelligence Community CIO Al Tarasiuk said that the IC more broadly was developing "an architecture where we're going to bring some commercial cloud capabilities inside our fence lines," and would use "the provider's business processes with the provider driving those to help us" alongside some government-managed cloud technologies.

This work would be part of a broader IC plan called the Intelligence Community IT Enterprise to integrate and consolidate intelligence community IT and turn the five highest-spending intelligence agencies into IT service providers for the rest of the IC.

Tarasiuk said in an August interview with InformationWeek that the idea to bring "commercial cloud capabilities" inside IC firewalls originated with the CIA, which, he said, "was on a path to leverage commercial industry to bring within their fence line an Internet-scale [cloud computing] capability."

Even if the specific deal between the CIA and Amazon continues to go unconfirmed, given recent remarks of intelligence officials, an effort to work with public cloud computing vendors in some way is likely underway.