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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

To qualify any hosted mail service to handle valuable, confidential data seems difficult. For example:

What are the confidentiality provisions? Can they be changed without your consent? Does Amazon possess cleartext data and metadata? Do they monitor it to collect customer data? Who at Amazon can access it and when? What is their retention policy? Is non-retained data destroyed or just left on the storage medium until overwritten? How will they respond to subpoenas, warrants, and similar requests from counterparties in lawsuits or from government? And perhaps most importantly, how able are they to execute their policies and what deters Amazon from violating them (i.e., what is the penalty?)?

Is there any service that satisfies these requirements?

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There's some spectrum between:

1) a shared consumer service (i.e. a bunch of gmail accounts in the public namespace)

2) some kind of dedicated-instance-within app service (which seems to be how google apps for your domain works)

3) container/vm based isolation of app service (i.e. a provider who runs dedicated VMs of their own or standard platforms for people...I think some of the hosted exchange options are like this)

4) dedicated servers but with provider retaining root, but a third party or your own staff doing app administration on mail server

5) #4 but without root for provider, but with normal machines and thus singleuser

6) #4/5 with encrypted disk, such that it would be trickier

7) Colo vs. dedicated servers, with full crypto.

8) On-premise

I personally think the correct option for most organizations for mail is absolute-minimum 3, maybe 4. I feel uncomfortable less than 6. For someone like wikileaks, you are abjectly incompetent other than 7 or 8, at least using commodity technology today.

Isn't the NSA/CIA hosting with Amazon nowadays?

Maybe their website. Not for anything that matters. They're not building billion-dollar datacenters in Utah for fun.

Amazon has a separate cloud for government computing that conforms to the various classification regimes, iirc.

That's GovCloud, see here: http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

The 600 million contract described here is not GovCloud: http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-ser...?

I think I read somewhere about rumors of intelligence agencies availabilty zone, under physical control of US intelligence agencies.

After all, at a massive scale, having access to industry standard tools for provisionning makes sense: give $$$ to AMZN for their software stack and hw integration cost probably less than building your own...?

AWS GovCloud exist solely for this purpose: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/what...

A really private AV zone is just a step away: put gov guards at the entrance of DCs, replace all AWS teams by in-house personnel (or have AWS teams sworned in at the relevant level...?)

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/govc...

> Hard token multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices are not available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

"a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-de...

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