Cybersecurity

CIA’s Cloud is ‘Pretty Close’ to Invincible, CIO Says

John Edwards, who became the spy agency’s top tech executive last year amid the intelligence community’s seismic shift to cloud computing, said striking a deal with Amazon Web Services was the “best decision we ever made.”

Speaking Wednesday at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., Edwards gave a glimpse at unclassified advancements in how the 17 agencies of the intelligence community use the C2S cloud. Broadly, he said cloud computing at the CIA has led to improved security, upped mission impact and avoided costs with maintaining decades-old legacy systems.

“We want to be like commercial companies, not the government,” Edwards said. “[Cloud] is the most innovative thing we’ve done, and it’s having a material impact on the CIA and IC.”

Cloud adoption among agencies, he said, has increased more than 200 percent year over year, which means the cultural resistance to cloud computing is eroding. The IC has also upped its compute 1,400 percent in three years, one AWS official said. And a DevOps Factory through C2S now boasts more than 4,000 developers, allowing for “higher-quality, more consistent code” at higher velocity, Edwards said.