Treasury taps Amazon for cloud services

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The U.S. Department of Treasury has launched a newly redesigned website and has reportedly migrated four of its existing sites to Amazon Web Services.

According to Smartronix, this is the first time a cabinet-level agency has utilized Amazon Web Services for its websites, and the move represents a trend within the Obama administration to deploy more IT services in the cloud.

Smartronix was selected in June 2010 to redesign the Treasury's website and migrate the existing sites to the cloud. According to the IT solutions provider, the websites MyMoney.gov, TIGTA.gov, SIGTARP.gov and IRSOversightBoard.treasury.gov are now all being hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

"Treasury's decision to move its flagship site to a public cloud infrastructure reflects the administration's commitment to closing the IT gap between the public and private sectors by leveraging the power of technology," said federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra.

The Obama administration has been a proponent of cloud computing use within federal agencies. Last month, the Office of Management and Budget issued a statement encouraging agencies to consider a "cloud first" approach when implementing technology.