SAP National Security Services Inc., a subsidiary of enterprise software giant SAP SE that offers services for the U.S. national security and critical infrastructure sectors, is teaming up with Amazon Web Services Inc. on a “highly secure” commercial cloud platform.

The partnership fuses SAP’s HANA Cloud with the AWS GovCloud. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is a platform-as-a-service offering that’s used to create and test HANA-based cloud applications and extend cloud and on-premises software. AWS GovCloud is an isolated AWS region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud in order to help customers support their U.S. government compliance requirements.

The partnership will enable customers in the U.S. national security and critical infrastructure sectors to migrate to the cloud quickly and securely while ensuring they stay in compliance, the companies said.

Customers can now choose to host their HANA applications in AWS’ GovCloud, which has already been certified to handle workloads governed by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, Department of Defense Security Requirements Guidelines and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. With AWS GovCloud, organizations can run their applications in a secure cloud infrastructure with services and support provided by Amazon.

Under the partnership, SAP’s experts will take care of the onboarding and managed-services requirements for HANA workloads running on AWS GovCloud.

“As government load move to the public cloud, so do defense applications,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “These applications, just like commercial enterprise software, get augmented by the public cloud in regards of storage, compute, AI and more. So it comes as no surprise for SAP NS2 get its Secure HANA cloud offering running on AWS GovCloud, enabling defense agencies to move loads and build next-generation apps on the combined platform.”

Government cloud is an extremely lucrative and hotly contested sector for cloud providers. AWS rival Microsoft Corp. is also deeply engaged in the sector, announcing a custom version of its Azure Stack infrastructure for private cloud deployments and plans for two new government cloud regions that will bring its total to eight.

The government cloud sector is also the center of much controversy, particularly regarding the way contracts are chosen. One recent example pertained to the award of a $950 million contract to an AWS partner, Rean Cloud, by the Pentagon. The deal later came under criticism from rivals such as Oracle Corp. for appearing to favor AWS and consequently the value was slashed to just $65 million.

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