Amazon Web Services Launches Second GovCloud Region in the United States

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region—a new region of interconnected data centers specifically for the U.S. government and its various contractors. The GovCloud (US-East) Region joins GovCloud (US-West) as the second AWS GovCloud Region in the US. It is the 19th AWS Region worldwide. The new facility meets the requirements of the US public sector and commercial customers in highly regulated industries.

“Based on the growth of GovCloud (US-West) and high customer demand for a second region in the eastern part of the US, we’ve opened a second GovCloud Region so that AWS customers can support their mission-critical programs with even lower latency to the East Coast and have the ability to implement cross-region disaster recovery,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS.

United States government agencies and the IT contractors that serve them were early users of AWS GovCloud (US-West). It is also used by US public sector and commercial customers in highly regulated industries such as education, financial services, and healthcare. The new facility provides the customers a multi-region architecture allowing them to meet their disaster recovery and continuity of operations requirements.

According to Amazon’s cloud computing arm, the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region is available for multiple AWS Services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), among many others. Like AWS GovCloud (US-West), the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region consists of three Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone boasts of independent power, cooling, and physical security. Also, they are connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. The AWS Global Infrastructure now offers a total of 57 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in over 190 countries.

The company launched its first AWS GovCloud Region in 2011. AWS was the primary cloud provider to open an isolated infrastructure region designed to meet government and other highly regulated industry requirements.