Red Hat (RHT) wants to move more government organizations to the open source cloud. On March 4, the company announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US) Region, a special segment of the Amazon cloud tailored for U.S. government data and workloads.

For government agencies, compliance is the key word, and moving sensitive data and applications to a public cloud platform such as AWS poses particular compliance challenges. In light of this concern, Red Hat is pitching the new AWS offering as a way to help provide extra compliance and regulatory assurance in the cloud for government organizations.

RHEL, as the company noted, is already widely deployed as an enterprise operating system within government agencies, and "has completed 15 Common Criteria certifications across four hardware platforms, earning Red Hat a place at the top of the list of the industry's most certified operating systems." In other words, since government organizations are already running RHEL on-premise, migrating to RHEL servers in the cloud will be a seamless process in the eyes of customers, the company hopes.

Red Hat also appears hopeful that government customers will be attraced to its RHEL cloud service because RHEL is an enterprise operating system they already know well. And since the AWS GovCloud version of RHEL is identical to the software organizations are already running on-premise, "AWS GovCloud (US) customers will realize the added efficiencies of a standard operating environment across multiple deployment scenarios," the company said.

RHEL for GovCloud is available now through the standard GovCloud management console.