NSA’s secret Amazon-developed cloud environment progressing ‘very well’

Development of the National Security Agency’s commercial cloud environment is progressing “very well,” according to an official from Amazon Web Services, the company that ultimately won a contract valued at up to $10 billion from the clandestine signals intelligence agency in 2022.

“Our plans are tracking right now,” David Appel, vice president of U.S. Federal for Amazon Web Services, told Nextgov/FCW on the sidelines of the Billington Cybersecurity Summit earlier this month. AWS will continue building the physical infrastructure and cloud computing regions required under the massive contract over the next year.

“As those areas come online … it’s fundamentally changing the way that the agency has typically done work in the past,” Appel said. “It’s an area that really excites us.”

Codenamed “WildandStormy,” details of the once-secret contract remain mostly classified, but it will likely be a critical component of the agency’s yearslong effort to modernize its classified data repository called the Intelligence Community GovCloud.  

For the past decade, NSA has been moving troves of its data, which includes signals intelligence, foreign surveillance and other material it ingests — into an internally operated data lake that agency analysts could run queries or perform analytics against. 

In 2021, NSA officials signaled a desire to bring in a commercial cloud provider to address scalability challenges and meet demands caused by an exponential growth in data and corresponding processing and analytics requirements.

Called the Hybrid Compute Initiative, the program aimed to maximize commercial cloud capabilities where applicable — meeting relevant agency security requirements — while maintaining some data and operations on internal servers.  

“The Hybrid Compute Initiative is a really good example of what it will look like for our future,” NSA Director Gen. Timothy Haugh said Sept. 5 at the Billington summit. “There are going to be some very unique technology that will be bespoke within the intelligence community, but we have to be able to leverage the rapid advancements that are occurring in industry.”

Appel said that while “there is a learning curve” for the agency in part because it’s the first time NSA has undertaken a commercial offering of this nature, he’s optimistic it won’t be steep in part because of the intelligence community’s previous commercial cloud experience with AWS. 

In 2013, AWS inked a $600 million cloud contract called C2S with the CIA to provide cloud services for the foreign intelligence agency and sister intelligence orgs. In 2020, the CIA issued its Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E contract to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM, further expanding the intelligence community’s use of commercial cloud technology.

“If I look back at where the intelligence community — the rest of the intelligence community — started a dozen years ago with C2S and to where it is today, the early years were pretty slow, because, again, there’s a learning process. There’s a learning curve,” Appel said. “I think that NSA and WildandStormy, have a much shorter learning curve because they have the benefit now of 12 years of the broader intelligence community utilizing the cloud. AWS being that provider, there’s a lot of lessons learned that are being applied.”

The NSA did not respond to a request for comment for this story.