I ran into Barb Darrow yesterday and we chatted about her post on the CIA contracting Amazon to build a cloud.

Report: The CIA and Amazon are in cahoots over secret cloud

by Barb Darrow

20 HOURS AGO

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photo: Thinkstock

SUMMARY:
Who better to show the CIA how to build a cloud than Amazon Web Services? No one’s confirming anything but an AWS-CIA contract would make sense for both parties.

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Now here’s a story that will probably never get confirmed: Federal Computer Week is reporting that the Central Intelligence Agency has contracted cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services to build a cloud for the super secret spy agency.

There can be a lot of speculation on what kind of cloud the CIA would want, but one thing is almost for sure. The CIA cloud is not a public cloud.

One data point is Amazon's continued expansion in Ashburn, VA.

For what it’s worth, Amazon’s biggest and oldest data center farm, US-East, is in Ashburn, Virg., and it is reportedly expanding its presence there with another huge data center farm. The CIA is based about 20 miles away in Langley, Virg.