Amazon Web Services is aiming to land more business from the U.S. government and its contractors with the rollout of “GovCloud,” a new cloud computing service that complies with U.S. government rules requiring defense-related information and other sensitive data to be accessible only by people from inside the country.

The company announced the new service this afternoon, with an endorsement from the chief technology officer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

GovCloud includes Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computer (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS) and other services. More details on the GovCloud site.

“Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by U.S. persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements,” Amazon said in a news release.

Microsoft and Google have also been competing for government business, focusing largely on applications in the cloud such as Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google Apps.

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