The Federal Government will spend $2 billion over the next decade to establish secure data storage for the country’s defence and intelligence organsations.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Australia had entered into a strategic partnership to deliver a Top Secret (TS) Cloud for the Australian Government.
Prime Minister Albanese said under the partnership AWS would establish a sovereign TS Cloud in Australia, which would be purpose-built to securely host the country’s most sensitive information.
“It will improve our ability to securely share and analyse our nation’s most classified data at speed and at scale and provides opportunities to harness leading technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said.
Prime Minister Albanese said the TS Cloud would bolster the resilience of Defence’s communications networks and was a critical enabling capability in supporting the Australian Defence Force’s military operations.
“It will also support greater interoperability and deeper collaboration with the United States.”
He said the joint-initiative offered significant opportunities for Australian industry, with AWS engaging local businesses to design and build the TS Cloud and potentially create 2000 jobs.
