FCW, a federal IT blog, reported yesterday that its sources confirmed that the CIA has inked a deal with Amazon, agreeing to a cloud computing contract “worth up to $600 million over 10 years.” These sources suggested to FCW that Amazon Web Services will help the intelligence agency build a private cloud network so that it can “keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA's previous cloud efforts.”

FCW also reports that the CIA's IT department has outlined efforts to promote "greater integration, information sharing, and information safeguarding through a common (intelligence community) IT approach that substantially reduces costs." The blog points out that comments such as these imply that there may be some changes coming to the way the CIA and other intelligence agencies share data—a marked departure for the isolated private clouds that the CIA is known be using presently.

Spokespeople for the CIA and Amazon declined to comment to FCW. But the blog noted that at recent speaking engagements, CIA officials have mentioned Amazon as models for cost-effective data management. At a gathering of Northern Virginia Technology Council board members last week, two audience members apparently told FCW that CIA Chief Information Officer Jeanne Tisinger said the agency was working "with companies like Amazon."

Industry experts speculated that such a deal could be significant in helping the CIA rein in budgets by outsourcing the project to an experienced company rather than designing cloud-computing infrastructure in-house.