Amazon Web Services announced the launch of the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region, its second GovCloud infrastructure region in the United States.
The AWS GovCloud is an isolated infrastructure region designed to meet the stringent requirements of the public sector and highly regulated industries, including being operated on US soil by US citizens, and are accessible only to vetted US entities and root account holders who must confirm they are US persons.
The first AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region opened in 2011. Like AWS GovCloud (US-West), AWS GovCloud (US-East) offers three Availability Zones. AWS Regions are comprised of multiple Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low-latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance.
AWS now provides 57 Availability Zones across 19 geographic regions globally with another 12 Availability Zones and four regions coming online in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, South Africa, and Sweden between the end of 2018 and the first half of 2020.
“For more than seven years, government customers and those in highly regulated industries have been using AWS GovCloud (US-West) to run workloads that must meet the most stringent security and compliance requirements,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. “Based on the growth of GovCloud (US-West) and high customer demand for a second region in the eastern part of the US, we’ve opened a second GovCloud Region so that AWS customers can support their mission-critical programs with even lower latency to the East Coast and have the ability to implement cross-region disaster recovery.”
