The government cloud is an expanding market, thanks in no small part to the White House’s “Cloud First” policy. So it comes as not even a slight shock that Amazon Web Services has launched AWS GovCloud, a region designed specifically to meet the needs of U.S. government agencies.

Previously, Amazon said in its blog post, AWS wasn’t equipped to store or handle data that had regulatory requirements. After all, many agencies (rightfully) won’t allow data to be kept in a public facility that can be accessed internationally. But with GovCloud, AWS can guarantee that only U.S. citizens can access the cloud resources, both “physically and logically,” opening the door wide for federal business.

What’s interesting is AWS already supported the lion’s share of regulatory standards, including FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1, and even the HIPAA healthcare protocol. It seems that only the physical location of the data was at issue here, which is notable when Google and Microsoft spent most of the Spring of 2011 sniping at each other over their respective cloud certifications.

Otherwise, AWS GovCloud is identical to the company’s other regions, offering Amazon EC2 compute, Amazon S3 storage and the rest of the company’s on-demand cloud products at the same scalable usage-based rate.

I can’t stress enough how much the public sector cloud market has grown and will continue to grow, especially if my hunches about new Federal CIO Steven L. VanRoekel and his commitment to the cloud prove correct. And now AWS is in place to reap the benefits.