Classified Cloud & AUKUS Winds

Hot off the end-of-year press is the US DoD announcement of a USD $9 Billion IDIQ award between the competing tribes of AWS, Microsoft, GCP, and Oracle for 'enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge'. It’s a five year gig – an eternity in tech time.

 

I could be wrong (again) but it seems to me that the US DoD/C2S/C2E/JEDI/JWCC decisions give some insight into potential Australian govt/DoD #cloudcomputing directions, depending on the weight you might give to #aukus. It’s fascinating (well, it is to me) given the Australian Intelligence Community’s Top Secret Cloud interest – which Microsoft reportedly “won” but withdrew from, and CIOG’s Secret Cloud – reportedly down-selected to AWS and a sovereign provider.

 

The traditional wisdom was that DoD (AU) would pursue a Three-Clouds-To-Rule-Them-All solution: Two hyperscalers to promote competition, preventing vendor price gauging, and covering Windows/365 and other environments; as well as a sovereign provider to meet government’s Australian interest/capability promises, and to provide a haven for particularly sensitive Australian data and workloads.

 

The black swan in all this is Ukraine. I’m hearing an argument that an emerging lesson from Ukraine is that true resilience isn’t achieved solely by data/compute sovereignty but also through a smart, nuanced combination of sovereignty and globality (I may have made this word up). In this way, a strike on Australian cloud infrastructure, power, cabling, or related #criticalinfrastructure is mitigated.

Here’s the thing – classified Cloud matters to Australia’s interests and security. It ain’t Goblin Mode. There’s a reasonably open, informed discussion to be had on how Australia does this in partnership with sovereign and allied IaaS/PaaS/SaaS providers in a way that’s smart, resilient, and effective.

As always, hit me up for a convo if you're interested.
Mick Lehmann
NEXTGEN Group General Manager, Government