Amazon Web Services (AWS) has allowed its customers to access AWS Outposts and connect them to US GovCloud regions, thus allowing them to access the full range of cloud services and run on-premises applications. AWS Outposts is a hybrid cloud service that was first announced in late 2018. The service extends native AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS deployments to customers’ own data centers. The services are like Microsoft’s Azure Stack that allows customers to run Azure cloud services within their own data centers.

Amazon’s move is significant as GovCloud hosts a lot of very sensitive data that needs to be handled while satisfying the US federal, state, and local government compliance requirements. Amazon is now expected to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for public and private sector customers.

After making AWS Outposts available in GovCloud (US) regions, Amazon is now allowing customers to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for private and public sector customers.

The AWS Outposts, after getting linked to GovCloud (US) systems, will allow customers to compute and store workloads on-premises with fully managed and configurable infrastructure stacks based on AWS-designed hardware. The on-premises workloads can run with the same AWS application programming interfaces, control planes, hardware, and tools used to connect traditional AWS applications. In a blog, AWS explained that Outposts enable customers to run workloads that need low-latency access to on-premises systems locally while connecting back to the AWS GovCloud Regions for application management.

AWS Outposts currently support a range of Amazon EC2 instances for computing tasks, including M5, C5, G4, and R5 instances, with and without local storage. It can also be used to access cloud services such as Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS for containerized applications.

Most organizations that operate on AWS technology are likes of the US Department of Justices’ Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy, DOJ’s Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy, US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Export Administration Regulations (EAR), and Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG). AWS, in the blog, explained that Outposts can manage, process, and analyze the data locally and use AWS GovCloud (US) for additional processing or long-term storage.