The government doesn’t exactly have a reputation for staying on top of technology trends, but when it comes to cloud computing, the bureaucratic machine seems to be making an exception. Amazon Web Services (AWS) global public sector vice president Teresa Carlson recently returned to theCUBE to share her firsthand perspective on how the pay-as-you-go model is helping drive more value out of taxpayer money.

That most powerful example of that hit the industry radar under Carlson’s watch last year when the CIA awarded Amazon an unprecedented $600 million contract to build the intelligence community a dedicated implementation of its platform. And as if it wasn’t significant enough in its own right, the deal triggered a realization among government technology buyers the world over that the public cloud has become a viable option, leading to an outpouring of demand that has provided a tremendous boost for the company’s public cloud business.

“A lot of people woke up that the intelligence community is looking at cloud and if they say it’s secure, why shouldn’t we be looking at cloud?” Carlson told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman. But the biggest surge of interest came from traditional enterprises, she highlighted, many of which have been on the fence about whether or not to adopt public cloud prior to the announcement of the CIA contract.

For its part, the spy agency has also gained a great deal from the agreement, although it doesn’t yet have access to all the benefits available to commercial users. Chief among the missing features is the massive selection of partner-developed applications on the AWS Marketplace, which are not fully up to par with its internal security requirements. But Carlson said that Amazon is planing to change that with a custom version of the catalog that is being built from the ground up to meet the CIA’s stringent privacy needs.

That is no simple task, but the company is not starting off with a clean slate either, having previously certified its platform to meet the US government’s FedRAMP standards and the first five tiers of the Department of Defense’s even stricter Cloud Security Model. Still, Carlson admitted the CIA project did take some extra effort. “Because cloud is so new, we had to start from scratch in building these controls,” she said. “It was a lot of give and take: them sharing with us their concerns and us sharing with them how the cloud works and operates,” she detailed.

According to the executive, AWS is also being put to use abroad in countries such as Singapore, which is basing much of its ambitious plan to become the world’s first “smart nation” with a fully networked society on the platform. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Amazon as more public sector segments, from education to aerospace, jump on the public cloud bandwagon.

“You can see by the number of services that we’re launching that we continue to see all these amazing opportunities to do more,” Carlson concluded “We’re constantly being self-critical of what we need to do next, what we need to do better and that’s the best part about what we do.”

Watch the full interview (21:09)