"Best Decision We Ever Made"

-CIA CIO John Edwards

John Edwards, who became the spy agency’s top tech executive last year amid the intelligence community’s seismic shift to cloud computing, said striking a deal with Amazon Web Services was the “best decision we ever made.”

Speaking Wednesday at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., Edwards gave a glimpse at unclassified advancements in how the 17 agencies of the intelligence community use the C2S cloud. Broadly, he said cloud computing at the CIA has led to improved security, upped mission impact and avoided costs with maintaining decades-old legacy systems.

“We want to be like commercial companies, not the government,” Edwards said. “[Cloud] is the most innovative thing we’ve done, and it’s having a material impact on the CIA and IC.”

Source: Defense One

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image - 21st Century Wire

In a deal that sent shock waves through the tech industry, the CIA awarded Amazon with a $600 million contract to provide the CIA with Cloud technology aimed at streamlining intelligence and by making data sharing between the 17 IC agencies more expedient.

Intelligence agencies will be able to host applications or order a variety of on-demand services like storage, computing and analytics. True to the National Institute of Standards and Technology definition of cloud computing, the IC cloud scales up or down to meet the need.

In that regard, customers will pay only for services they actually use, which is expected to generate massive savings for the IC.

Source: The Atlantic

The rosy picture painted by Mr. Edwards seems to neglect the fact that the CIA has lost complete control of their cyber weapons and malware arsenal onto the world wide web. The leak of their cyber weapons is a threat to the safety of everyone using the internet and to US national security. Edward's fails to address the elephant in the room, the extensive compilation of CIA cyber weapons Wikileaks made public in their Vault 7 leaks.

It’s also extremely secure, Edwards said. AWS technically operates and maintains the C2S region for the IC on the CIA’s premise, but the cloud itself is not connected to the internet. The CIA and AWS have partnered to create additional security overlays in addition to the air gap and three geographically dispersed zones of availability.

“I’m never going to say anything you do in the cyber world is totally invincible, but this is pretty close,” Edwards said. “We took a hardened cloud on the outside, dropped it behind our guards, gates and guns. I would argue and say this is the most secure thing out there. It’s a game-changer for us, I don’t think anything out there is any more protected.”

Source: Defense One

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Unfortunately for the CIA, and the entire internet, "Pretty close to invincible" does not mean infallible.

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