AWS becomes first cloud provider cleared for NATO restricted data

Amazon Web Services Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 1.89% announced on Tuesday that it has become the first cloud provider approved to handle NATO RESTRICTED workloads across all 32 member nations, a milestone that positions the company ahead of rivals Microsoft ↗ 0.12% and Google Alphabet Inc. ↘ 2.88% in the competition for sensitive government and defense contracts.

The approval allows NATO, its defense industry partners, and all member nations to use AWS services for information classified at the NATO RESTRICTED level — a designation that sits just below classified but still requires safeguarding — in any AWS Region located in a NATO member country.defenseone+1

A Multi-Year Effort

The approval followed a "sustained, multi-year effort," according to David Appel, acting vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. To gain clearance, AWS documented its compliance against NATO D32, the technical directive establishing security requirements for handling NATO RESTRICTED information in the public cloud. Spain's National Cryptographic Centre evaluated AWS's capabilities, and NATO then published the results to all member states.aboutamazon+1

AWS currently operates 15 Regions in NATO member nations, seven of which are in mainland Europe. The alliance-wide approval provides NATO members with a common, pre-assessed security baseline intended to reduce the time, cost, and effort of meeting compliance obligations and accelerate their own national accreditation processes.aboutamazon

Strategic Implications

As Defense One reported, the approval underscores that an increasingly defense-conscious Europe still relies on American technology infrastructure, even as the continent pushes for greater strategic autonomy. AWS beat its primary competitors — other U.S. cloud providers including Microsoft — to win the alliance's first blanket approval of this kind.defenseone

Dylan Browne, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, said the availability of commercial products meeting NATO's security requirements "expands the technology options available for the Alliance and supports our ability to adopt modern technologies while maintaining the security and resilience on which our operations depend".aboutamazon

The announcement builds on AWS's broader push into defense and intelligence work. In June, the company launched its Secret Cloud for Industry offering, designed to reduce provision times for classified environments from months to days. More than 15,000 government customers already use AWS, according to the company.nextgov+1