The CIA’s personal Amazon cloud is now live

The Central Intelligence Agency is now officially an Amazon Web Services cloud consumer. Less than 10 months after a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge ended a public battle between AWS and IBM for the CIA’s commercial cloud contract valued at up to $600 million, the AWS-built cloud for the intelligence community went online last week for the first time, according to a source familiar with the deal.

The cloud built for the Central Intelligence Agency by Amazon Web Services, is now online, according to a Defenseone report. Citing an unnamed source , reporterFrank Konkel — who has been all over this story since the get go — said the cloud actually went online last week although all its services are not yet available. The work is the result of a $600 million contract (over 10 years) that AWS won in a competitivee bidding situation over IBM. IBM challenged the award but in October, AWS got the green light to go ahead.. A CIA spokesperson told the publication that the goal is to make the intelligence cloud services available in the summer of 2014 and is on target to meet that deadline. The CIA could not be reached for comment; AWS had no comment.