Amazon spreads its Web in Washington

1000 Genomes

As part of the government’s big data pilot effort, Amazon Web Services was credited for its work on the 1000 Genomes Project, a National Institutes of Health program that provides 200 terabytes of data on human genetic variation, the equivalent of 16 million file cabinets worth of text.

More on this Story

• Amazon spreads its Web in Washington
• The rise of real estate researchers
• Safeway enhances its rewards program
• Internet law goes mainstream

View all Items in this Story

• Georgetown tech company sees big opportunities in small data
• Retailers go high-tech to manage inventory
• Edgar Online teams with OTC for data service
• Banks layer up on security to protect customers
• Six to watch: Helping government use big data
• Big data helps advertisers find the right audience
• Feds declares success on IT reform plans
• Commentary: We need a ‘cloud-first’ czar
• Data in service for nonprofits

Amazon is storing the data, making it publicly available and free to government agencies, private researchers and individuals. Those who access the data — 3,500 did within the first week, according to the NIH — pay only to analyze the data, not to download or store it.

The data has always been available, but researchers previously needed to download it onto their own machines first, meaning they needed large bandwidth and storage capabilities. Now, researchers can move immediately to analysis, which Don Preuss, head of NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information’s systems group, said would give them more flexibility to do initial testing of a hypothesis.

Amazon also recently worked on a big data project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, storing a health monitoring system to help track outbreaks.

According to the CDC, the new program allows jurisdictions to share data and represents the first Department of Health and Human Services program to completely move to the cloud.

As Amazon has made inroads in the government market, it’s made a point of partnering with a whole range of contractors, from small cybersecurity firms such as Herndon-based Xceedium to larger companies such as SAP. Carlson said contractors are coming to AWS as frequently as the company is reaching out.

Getting on a schedule

Last month, Aquilent, a Laurel consulting firm that works exclusively with the federal government and focuses on helping agencies buy cloud solutions, announced it has added Amazon GovCloud to its schedule with the General Services Administration. GSA administers schedules as ways for federal agencies to buy products more quickly and use pre-negotiated deals.

David G. Fout, president and chief executive of Aquilent, said the company specifically sought to get Amazon onto its GSA schedule because Amazon’s GovCloud was becoming the best option for many of Aquilent’s customers.

“We came to them and said, ‘Hey, we think you guys can win this battle,’ ” Fout said. Amazon is “focused on building the best cloud computing services available. They’re not really focused on, let’s figure out how the federal government works and let’s figure out how to sell to them, so what they want to use is partners.”

Earlier this month, Xceedium — known for technology that makes sure only verified users can log onto secured IT infrastructure — showed off a new platform known as “Xsuite Cloud,” meant to provide Amazon infrastructure with Xceedium’s security controls.

When Xceedium heard from its customers about the “providers of cloud services that they were already either working with or were interested in working with ... frankly the one that came up the most — particularly in public sector — was AWS,” said Glenn C. Hazard, the company’s chief executive.

Carlson argued these partnerships will become even more valuable as the federal government moves beyond some of the easier shifts to cloud — like moving e-mail systems — to more complex issues.

For instance, last month Amazon and SAP announced a new cloud-based way for federal agencies to manage and secure their mobile devices.

McCarthy said it makes sense for Amazon to continue to partner with systems integrators now as these kinds of companies are helping federal agencies integrate their new cloud-based programs with existing systems.

“Anybody who’s offering this kind of solution always needs to play nicely with” systems integrators, he said. But eventually, he said, “my guess is more [federal agencies] will be going directly to the software providers.”

At the same time, competition is growing. Verizon, which maintains a federal office in Ashburn, has beefed up its infrastructure with the purchase of Terremark last year in a roughly $1.4 billion deal. About one-quarter of Terremark’s business was already with the federal government.

While Mirandi said AWS has something of a head start, other competitors include AT&T, Rackspace and IBM. Rackspace and NASA partnered on OpenStack, which provides an open source platform for building cloud computing services.

Carlson said she expects the government’s momentum toward cloud computing, data center consolidation and big data analysis to continue to provide opportunities for Amazon.

“Our work is not done, and it’s not going to be done for a very long time because we’re just in the beginning stages still,” she said.