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