“We’ve used private-sector technology in national security applications for decades, to keep the country safe,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official spokesman told reporters. The UK government declined to comment on the substance of the report.
The arrangement reportedly covers MI5, the UK’s domestic security service, and MI6, its foreign arm, as well as other government branches, but Amazon itself will not have access to the data. It was said to be spearheaded by Britain’s cybersecurity agency GCHQ, which had wanted to find a UK cloud provider but decided that none had the capability of Amazon Web Services.
The secret contract was signed this year and experts estimate its value at £500 million ($690 million) to £1 billion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the discussions. London, United Kingdom, October 26 – UK intelligence agencies have entrusted classified data to Amazon’s cloud computing arm AWS in a deal designed to vastly speed up their espionage capabilities, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
