The two Top Secret regions are more than 1,000 miles apart, giving customers options to store data closer to users for latency-sensitive workloads. Each region consists of multiple Availability Zones to ensure resiliency. The Top Secret region is accredited for security compliance under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Intelligence Community Directive (ICD 503) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 Revision 4. Last month, the DoD asked AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle to submit bids for a new, multi-billion-dollar cloud contract. While it’s asking for four bids, the federal government said it anticipates awarding just two contracts – one to AWS and one to Microsoft.