Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is one of the company’s most profitable arms, and it recently gained a new customer: the U.S. Department of Defense.
Earlier this week, the DoD granted Amazon a provisional authorization to host its Impact Level 5 workloads, which are the Pentagon’s and U.S. military’s most classified information. Only two other tech companies are allowed to store this data: Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM).
“This further bolsters AWS as an industry leader in helping surrport the DoD’s critical mission in protecting our security,” said Amazon in a statement. “The AWS services support a variety of DoD workloads, including workloads contained sensitive controlled unclassified information and National Security Systems information.”
While the Defense Department is already using AWS to host sensitive, mission-critical workloads, this week’s announcement shows just how much Amazon’s cloud services are trusted. AWS is the dominant cloud service provider throughout the U.S. intelligence community as well after its $600 million contract with the CIA.
Last quarter, AWS revenues totaled $4.1 billion, marking growth of 42% year-over-year and 12% sequentially. This came in-line with recent growth rates, meaning that Amazon AWS was able to maintain its impressive momentum in the second quarter.
Currently, Amazon is a #5 (Strong Sell) on the Zacks Rank, and shares have gained over 31.5% year-to-date.
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