However Amazon Web Services Inc. may struggle in selling cloud to glacier-paced government agencies, at least one of those that readers may have heard of — the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — just vouched for it at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.

CIA Chief Information Officer John Edwards said from the conference stage that adopting Amazon’s cloud has been perhaps the agency’s’ smartest decision to date, according to John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

In a live interview, Walls and co-host John Furrier (@furrier) asked Teresa Carlson (pictured), vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services, for her reaction to Edwards’ statement.

“We just had to drop the microphone — boom — and you’re sort of done,” Carlson said. It marks a milestone in AWS’ journey through the public sector, which aroused lots of skepticism in the beginning, she explained.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Teresa Carlson in our Guest of the Week feature.

Remembering early conversations with prospective government customers and with media like theCUBE, Carlson noted how far into advanced tech the public sector is now willing to wade.

“We talked about what are the kinds of workloads, and we talked a little bit about … website hosting; that’s of course really evolved into things like machine learning, artificial intelligence … massive scale of applications,” she said.

The CIA continues to lead the Amazon public sector charge, providing a case study in how a maximum security government agency can still manage and benefit from cloud agility.

The CIA DevOps Factory demonstrates just how much the agency’s cloud adoption has sped up development of new applications and projects, Carlson explained. It used to take the CIA’s information technology team forever to provision the necessary hardware, software, etc., for new projects, she added.

“Now what they do is they just use any node they have and they go and provision the cloud, like that,” she said. “They can create AMIs [Amazon Machine Images], so that they have super repeatable tools.”

AMIs let the agency pull down code and development components and then build off of them again and again. This ultimately results in much faster building and deployment.

It appears that the public sector has collectively become envious of the CIA’s cloud and wants to follow suit, Carlson stated.

Ask not what your cloud can do …

The U.S. federal government has issued the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which will reportedly spend $250 million to bring  government agencies into the Digital Age, Carlson explained, adding that the bill is unprecedented.

American government officials have also given an executive order to improve cybersecurity, specifically, in the public sector, with cloud technology an area of special interest, according to Carlson. Already, many public sector agencies are modernizing noticeably, and the culture is at least as difficult to change as the hardware or software in an organization.

Carlson noted a learning curve in the way organizations acquire information technology, particularly. “They know how to write acquisitions for a missile or a tanker or something really big in IT. And what’s changing is their ability to write acquisitions for agile IT, things like cloud utility-based models,” she said.

Some well-known agencies using modern cloud technology to better perform their tasks include National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Department of Health and Social Services; Department of Justice; and Department of Homeland Security for customs and border patrol. Much smaller public agencies and nonprofits can make use of the cloud too, according to Carlson.

Non-profit organizations like Feed the World and The American Heart Association routinely amaze Carlson with how they stretch funding dollars to carry out their missions, she stated, adding that Amazon cloud is proud to enable outfits like these.

Continuing in the public service vein, Amazon has loaded special datasets — covering the Earth, medical disorders, genomes, etc. — in its cloud for educational and research purposes.

“We fund multiple datasets that we put in the cloud for the individual student to research for no fee,” she said, adding that fees are assessed only if users create their own systems from the datasets.

Rules and regs take a bite from AWS

If there is a roadblock to Amazon taking over the public sector in the US and worldwide, it may be that its government cloud requires U.S. citizenship.

“We’ve talked about the challenges of technology and skill — that’s just out there right?” she said, adding that AWS’s commercial cloud employs many foreign-born developers and technologists.

To be clear, non-citizens can take part in building some aspects of the government cloud, but they are not permitted to manage it in any capacity, she stated. For this reason, the cadence of Amazon’s government cloud releases may be slow to catch up to that of its commercial cloud, she added.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE