Amazon AWS: Good enough for the CIA

Leena Rao has a fascinating background story at Fortune on Amazon Web Services, built around a profile of its leader, Senior Vice President Andy Jassy. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but this bit was particularly interesting:

Net­flix’s adoption also gave other big companies and institutions the confidence to try AWS. Its heavyweight corporate customers now include Samsung, Comcast, and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, to name just a few. In 2013, AWS won a contract from the Central Intelligence Agency—a classified deal that became public knowledge when a competitor sued the government over it. Once that news broke, Jassy recalls, “a lot of companies would say, ‘Well, if the security and performance is good [enough] for the CIA, then it’s probably good enough for us.’ ”

Read about the original disclosure of the deal over at Federal Computing World.

Apple sold 5.7 million tablets in the U.S. last quarter, court documents show. Samsung sold 37,000