SiliconANGLEs theCUBE broadcast live from the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas at the AWS re:Invent 2013 conference this week. On Wednesday, SiliconANGLEs John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon, sat down with the vice president of Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector, Teresa Carlson.

The conversation immediately turned to the birth and growth of this section of the AWS portfolio. As Carlson noted, AWS started their public sector business only three years ago. In that time they have amassed an impressive client list comprised of more than 600 government customers worldwide along with some 2400 educational institutions.

AWS, impressed with the commitment made by the US government, jumped into this sector and hasn’t looked back. The bulk of the government commitment centered around their four phase approach to transitioning to the cloud:

Phase 1 – Implement a Cloud First Policy

Phase 2 – Define the Cloud via NIST

Phase 3 – FEDramp GovCloud and US East and US West cloud

Phase 4 – Acquisition

According to Carlson, “They started with the low hanging fruit of website hosting. Then they moved into things like collaboration sites, both internal and external. And now they’re doing things like Big Data analytics, and management of that data.”

She cites endeavors, like tracking flu patterns or autism research, as being a fantastic use of those technologies because the data can be shared across the country and around the world, allowing crowdsourcing solutions to be developed and done so more quickly.

An excellent use-case of the rollouts of phases 2 and 3 is GovCloud. AWS, working with NASA and JPL, developed GovCloud to be an isolated AWS Region designed to meet the stringent regulatory restrictions established in ITAR, FISMA and FedRAMP. Carlson states their commercial cloud environments enjoy the same level of security as GovCloud.

In this year alone, GovCloud has seen growth in excess of 300 percent. Not only are defense and aerospace agencies opting in, but other public sector governmental agencies are taking advantage as well. The only regulatory difference between GovCloud and AWSs US East and US West regions is that Amazon personnel operating GovCloud must be what is termed a US person. This designation includes citizens and legal aliens in possession of a work visa.

Agencies not subject to the same protective regulations as defense and intelligence services face no requirement to transfer their data to GovCloud.  As Carlson notes, a lot of US governmental agencies prefer the US East and US West clouds.

AWS views their public sector platforms in the same way they approach innovations on their traditional consumer cloud models. They built and are able to adapt the infrastructures based on feedback received from their customers. With the one exception that the infrastructure is populated by public sector clients, the service they receive is identical to service provided across the rest of AWS.

“We are aiming to be a top public sector cloud provider around the world. We need to show that we can adapt an infrastructure that serves the needs of the customer,” said Carlson.

Addressing a query by Furrier, Carlson commented on how contracting and compliance has evolved in only the past few years. “I think there are two things that are really important. One is that we are committed to saving our customer money. Number two, we are committed to giving our public sector customer those price drops. So the things that are changing in government contracting centers around the agility of not only the contract timing, but also the results.

“When they see the results and the cost/value margin, they go out for another one.”

The conversation concluded regarding the challenges faced by AWS in educating their new public sector clients and managing their expectations.

“It’s a big culture change. It’s a lot of education on what cloud is and isn’t. And you can see the ‘a-ha’ moments in the early days when they see you can go to literally a console and spin up instances and you’re not waiting six months to buy servers. Then four more months to configure them and test them and get them ready to go.

And the good thing we were talking about on the FedRAMP, when you spin up instances they’re ready to go. They are already under the compliance review. It saves so much time,” Carlson concluded.