Amazon on Tuesday unveiled a new cloud services offering designed specifically for U.S. government agencies and contractors that need to abide by stringent regulatory and compliance requirements.

AWS GovCloud meets a host of unique government regulations for processing sensitive workloads and storing data, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which governs the manner in which defense-related data must be stored. To meet these standards, Amazon is storing the servers that will power GovCloud on the west coast of the U.S., rather than overseas.

The service will also be compliant with other security controls and certifications, including FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1 and various HIPAA regulations, among others.

Teresa Carlson, vice president of Global Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), said that more than 100 government agencies are already leveraging AWS services in some fashion. The GovCloud offering should enable Amazon to upsell these organizations and have them move all of their data over to the cloud.

“These customers are satisfied with the general security controls and procedures in AWS but in these more sensitive cases they often need assurances that only personnel that meet certain requirements can access their data,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in a blog post. “AWS GovCloud implements specific requirements of the US government such that agencies at the federal, state and local levels can use the AWS cloud for their more sensitive workloads.”

As with other, more traditional cloud offerings, AWS GovCloud will be offered on a pay-as-you-go model on single year or multi-year terms, according to Information Week. The GovCloud platform will come loaded with a trove of well-known AWS on-demand resources, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

The launch of AWS GovCloud comes on the heels of a recent Obama initiative known as the Cloud First policy, which stipulates that government agencies must at least consider the idea of deploying cloud solutions when upgrading their systems.

Amazon has now joined Google and Microsoft (News - Alert) as providers of cloud solutions that meet various government standards.

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