It was big news when the Central Intelligence Agency made a deal with Amazon Web Services Inc. to begin its cloud initiatives. So why did it  do it, and what has it been learning since? As the former chief technology officer of the CIA, Gus Hunt (pictured), who is currently the managing director of federal services at Accenture PLC, spoke out about the CIA’s reasons for adopting cloud.

“I spent 20 years in federal government working for CIA,” Hunt explained. “I retired from there as their chief technology officer. And I led basically the C2S [Commercial Cloud Services] deal that we put together [with Amazon] in order to bring cloud services into the agency.”

Hunt spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed the reasons CIA switched to cloud and future innovations within cloud. (*Disclosure below.)

The four reasons the CIA chose cloud

The CIA began its cloud services for four reasons, according to Hunt. The first reason was speed. “We had to get our speed of abilities, delivery capabilities, up to match what was happening in the private sector in the cloud,” Hunt said.

The second reason was because the CIA needed to tap into the efficiency of cloud to leverage big data. Ultimately, this was to enable the third reason: innovation. “We had to be able to innovate as fast as the private sector was able to innovate, to deliver new capabilities continuously all the time,” Hunt stated.

The fourth reason was security, because it turned out that the cloud was much more secure than originally thought. “If you leverage the cloud in a particular way … [cloud] becomes a much more secure environment for people to operate in and do work in than you can possibly achieve inside your own data centers,” Hunt said.

Hunt is now part of the private sector, but he said that when working in the government, everybody thought that the private sector was more innovative. “We really thought that the private sector was way ahead of us,” he said. “And so we spent lot of time working with the financial service people who were brilliant and working with Amazon and all of the people and all of the things that they were doing, because they were brilliant.”

However, the private sector is also looking at the public sector and taking note of their innovations, Hunt noted. “Particularly, from a cybersecurity optic, from a security optic, the federal government is viewed in many ways, and particularly the intelligence community itself is viewed as being far ahead of what goes on in the rest of the world.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE