From TechCrunch.com….
Amazon’s cloud services giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting into the encrypted messaging business. The company has just announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr — a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. It claims to be the only “collaboration service” that meets security criteria set out by the NSA.
AWS will continue operating Wickr as is, and offer its services to AWS customers, “effective immediately,” notes a blog post from Stephen Schmidt, the VP and CISO for AWS, announcing the news.
Financial terms were not disclosed in the short announcement. Wickr had raised just under $60 million in funding, according to PitchBook data (it also notes a valuation of under $30 million but that seems to be a very old estimate). Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud and enterprise division, AWS, has been a juggernaut for the e-commerce and services giant. AWS posted revenues of $13.5 billion last quarter, up 32% year-on-year, with net income of $8.1 billion.
Amazon’s purchase of a messaging product geared at providing secure services to government bodies is coming at a time when the company continues to be embroiled in a dispute around the JEDI contract, a $10 billion deal to provide services to the U.S. that Microsoft was granted during the Trump administration.
