Amazon Web Services Inc. may have lost its bid for a lucrative $10-billion cloud modernization contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, but the company is continuing to expand its public sector business.

On Wednesday, AWS announced a partnership with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, to provide cloud services for the agency’s Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT. By supporting CAT and its intake of 100 billion market transactions per day, AWS will also allow the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to monitor trading and other activities.

“This is the largest set of financial transactions you’ll ever see being processed and run on the cloud,” said Teresa Carlson (pictured), vice president of the worldwide public sector at AWS. “They’ll be looking of indicators of nefarious behavior within the markets.”

Carlson spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed the ongoing work of AWS within other federal agencies and the challenge of retiring technical debt.

Major work with defense agency

The deal with FINRA served as a reminder that AWS has continued to pursue public sector business in general and federal government contracts in particular. While she did not discuss any specific details around the controversial loss of the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft Corp. in October, Carlson did not hesitate to point out that AWS still has a major presence within the defense agency.

“We have a very significant business doing work at every part of the Department of Defense,” Carlson said. “We are not slowing down in DoD.”

The work of AWS within government agencies often requires a focus on eliminating technical debt, having to rework processes and systems because of outdated legacy infrastructure. This can also be complicated by the government’s time-consuming procurement process where technical requirements are set but become obsolete by the time a contract is actually awarded.

“These are not easy; it takes focus and leadership to make these large modernization efforts happen,” Carlson said. “It’s years and years of legacy applications that never had any modernization associated with them.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE