AWS expands DOD IL4, authentication services

Agencies, military units and commandos now in the Ministry of Defense have more tools in their arsenal when it comes to integrating cloud services into daily operations.

The Defense Information Systems Agency has granted temporary authorization for Amazon Web Services GovCloud to offer more than a dozen new cloud service applications under Tier 4. Impact AWS announced in the latest employment a blog post April 26 .

In 2016, AWS has received DISA Provisional Authority to provide two services: Amazon's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. The new IL-4 authorizations increase the number of bids to include AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Key Management Service, and Amazon redshift.

"CloudFormation is very important because it is an orchestration technology that allows you to automate, so rich, how to withstand a cloud environment and automate everything flows," said Mark Ryland, director of architecture solutions and chief architect of the World public sector by AWS teams. "[I] makes it less a manual procedure to use a cloud computing platform."

Although the DISA IL-4 permit facilitates the use of new services by AWS Department of Defense customers, this does not mean that they are automatically available for agency use.

"This announcement comes from a core group within the Department of Defense that created temporary permits, which means other groups within the Department of Defense can use," said M. Ryland. Users of the Department of Defense GovCloud "can take the document and analysis and granting the definitive authorization to operate."

In a separate blog post, AWS also announced multi-factor authentication capabilities for hardware-based GovCloud.

AWS has joined SurePassID, another digital security company, to implement the initiative, which will require users who log on to GovCloud to provide their user name and a password and authentication token code generated by the SurePassID.

The MFA tabs are stored in a different environment than the identity and access management in the GovCloud during the authentication process.

Ryland said that it is not supposed to replace the current GovCloud access cards through common access cards and personal identity verification cards. Instead, authentication-based tokens "fill the void" for agencies wishing to use GovCloud said Ryland. "This allows them to use a hardware token, but still get support from the MAE, which could be applicable in certain use cases."

Ryland describes the new features of the AMF plus a "edge case as a new critical capability" for GovCloud customers.