AWS partnering with the Australian Government to deliver cloud innovation in national security & defence

Today, our commitment to Australia reaches new heights with a $2 billion strategic partnership with the Australian Government to provide a "Top Secret" AWS Cloud (TS Cloud) to enhance the nation's defence and intelligence capabilities. The partnership leverages AWS's global experience, reliability, security, and performance, with local skilled personnel, ability to dedicate thousands of engineers and experts to long-term government initiatives. It provides for continuous infrastructure investment and focus on enhancing cloud services to meet evolving needs.

We’re excited by the opportunities the TS Cloud initiative brings to Australia’s economy and communities. The government’s investment opens doors for creating new jobs, developing skills, and sparking innovation across multiple sectors. By enabling Australian businesses to design, build, and integrate cutting-edge cloud capabilities, this collaboration will generate new local jobs in fields like cybersecurity, data analytics, and cloud computing.

The focus on nurturing Australian innovation builds upon over a decade of AWS investments in the country. Since 2012, AWS has invested more than $9.1 billion into the local economy, and plans to invest an additional $13.2 billion by 2027 - the largest technology investment in Australia's history.

The TS Cloud will be purpose-built for Australia’s Defence and Intelligence agencies to securely host sensitive information. It will enable the seamless sharing of classified data between Australia’s National Intelligence Community and the Australian Defence Force. It will unlock new Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to maintain the nation’s strategic advantage. The new TS Cloud will transform how the Defence and Intelligence agencies will securely host, share, and analyse classified data at scale.
 
With the TS Cloud, Australia’s Defence and Intelligence agencies will have the ability to select from AWS’s services across compute, storage, databases, analytics, AI and ML. Cloud technology is an important capability for agencies to accelerate innovation and agility whilst staying secure. By eliminating the basic, routine IT infrastructure tasks, agencies can focus on what’s most important to them: protecting and advancing Australia’s interests. The cloud eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of sourcing and maintaining IT hardware, and enables a mission first focus.

The TS Cloud will improve the ability of Australia’s Defence and Intelligence agencies to securely share and analyse our nation’s most classified data at speed and at scale. This cloud environment will help the Australian Government meet its data isolation, localisation, and security requirements, enabling it to run sensitive workloads in the cloud securely while offering its Defence and Intelligence agencies a seamless and consistent cloud experience.

AWS’s current certification as a Strategic Hosting Provider under the Australian Government’s Hosting Certification Framework in 2021 for our AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, reinforces our ongoing commitment to meet the highest standards of digital security, and our AWS services are continuously assessed through the Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) for operating workloads at the PROTECTED level - the highest Australian Government data classification attainable for public cloud services. As of June 2024, 151 AWS Cloud services are available across our infrastructure located in Australia. AWS supports more security standards and compliance certifications than any other offering, and makes available a full range of security protections, tools, and services to the Australian Government and our local customers.

The TS Cloud will benefit from AWS’s investments in building sustainable cloud infrastructure, and services. We recently announced our first renewable energy project in Queensland - the 125MW Amazon Solar Farm in Wandoan with Vena Energy. This solar farm is forecast to generate enough renewable energy to power more than 60,000 Aussie homes each year. In total, we now have seven renewable energy projects across Australia, including solar farms in NSW, a wind farm in Victoria, and rooftop solar installations. Our utility-scale renewable projects in Australia from 2020-2022 alone generated an estimated AU$467 million in local economic investment and contributed AU$187 million to the country's GDP.

The TS Cloud initiative presents a unique opportunity to further invest in Australia’s workforce, fostering innovation and creating new jobs across sectors such as cybersecurity, data analytics, and cloud computing. We are committed to collaborating with educational institutions, industry partners, and the government to develop comprehensive training programs that prepare Australians for the roles of the future.

Our aim is to empower Australians with the knowledge and capabilities to accelerate their careers and contribute to the nation's digital transformation. Since 2017, AWS has had the privilege of providing cloud skills training to over 400,000 individuals across Australia.

At AWS, we remain steadfast in our commitment to being a catalyst for growth, not only through our technological offerings, but also by nurturing the human capital that will drive Australia’s long-term success in the digital age.