Secretary of the Navy's site now on Amazon cloud

The Navy secretary's public Web portal has gone commercial, and now reaches the masses via Amazon Web Services' public cloud.

The switch to a commercial cloud was announced in an article penned by Department of the Navy CIO Terry Halvorsen in the latest issue of the department's IT magazine.

In the article, Halvorsen said the decision was made after analysis of the "type of data stored in the portal, the ease of access due to significantly faster response times, security and cost." He added that it was the first step in "moving unclassified data to a commercial hosting environment."

Overall, it will cost half as much to operate the portal via Amazon's cloud.

"The DON first considered a government site to host the portal but found that commercial sites are less expensive," Halvorsen wrote. "Further, congressional guidance requires the department to evaluate and select commercially provided services that meet security standards and are less expensive than what it costs to perform those services internally. As a result, the DON has achieved a 50 percent reduction in cost to operate the portal."

Halvorsen said the move to AWS is the "first case of the DON placing low-risk, public-facing data on a commercial server to save money" and hinted that it would not be the last, saying the department would continue to explore similar options.

AWS is no stranger to the federal market and has more than 300 customers at the local, state and federal levels.