The AUKUS Cloud Alliance: Making Data Centers the New Cold War Weapon
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- July 06, 2024
Australia’s defense forces are used to collaborating with global corporations such as Lockheed and Boeing. That connection is being extended to technology through major alliances with Microsoft and now Amazon.
With these moves, it is clear that national security and defense strategy has rapidly moved into the cyber realm, and the technology giants are now the new “primes,” as major defense contractors are known.
Australia’s choice of technology partners also reflects its geopolitical alignment, as it did when the procurement was primarily for military hardware.
The country is part of the AUKUS grouping with the U.S. and the U.K. in an increasingly cold confrontation with China.
In that context of an increasingly binary world, it is understandable that Australia would ban China’s Huawei from building its 5G network and, at the same time, engage Microsoft and Amazon for some of the most crucial and sensitive parts of its defense technology architecture.
Secret locations
Last week, the Australian Government announced that Amazon had won an AUD2 billion contract to build three data centers in secret locations to host the nation’s military secrets. The centers will be completed by 2027.
Calling the Top Secret (TS) Cloud, Amazon Web Services will build and operate the facilities. The government insists that Australia retain complete sovereignty over the cloud.
“Amazon is the world's biggest provider of cloud services, but it's also one that's chosen the side of democracy.”
The initiative has been hinted at for some months, with Australian officials discussing a secret intelligence community cloud that would help national security agencies detect threats through shared data while being interoperable with the U.S. and U.K. spy networks.
The Amazon alliance follows a March announcement that Microsoft would be Australia’s major cyber security partner, connecting intelligence agency the Australian Signals Directorate and its Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing (CTIS) platform with Microsoft Sentinel.
That outcome was vital to the Microsoft-ASD Cyber Shield initiative, which was part of Microsoft’s AUD5 billion investment in Australia in October 2023.
The announcement of the Amazon deal also prompted a flood of questions on social media and radio talk shows about the wisdom of engaging a private company to work with such top-secret government data.
In an interview on ABC radio, Katherine Manstead, executive director of cyber intelligence at Cyber CX, sought to calm those fears by saying that in the 21st century, “world governments don’t build technology anymore.”
Microsoft and Amazon are the two biggest targets for global hackers. However, the government argues they have the scale and systems to mount the best defense. While nothing is impregnable, Australia’s sovereign data is safer in that environment than anywhere else.
Advocates of the deal say that all the secret data will remain onshore, where it can leverage a range of artificial intelligence tools for more detailed analysis. The insights will then be shared through the common platforms with AUKUS allies.
“Governments procure those like defense procures military kit from private sector entities; [they] can’t go it alone here,” she said.
“Amazon is the world's biggest provider of cloud services, but it's also one, frankly, that's chosen the side of democracy when it comes to kind of thinking about how its technologies are used and how it will ensure that it doesn't necessarily get down the wrong path of some of the conflicts and the contexts emerging in our world.”
Manstead referred to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said that in that event, Amazon had effectively “put Ukraine’s government in a box.”
“It was picking up all of the important data from the Ukrainian government, whacking it onto servers, taking it out of the country, and putting it into Amazon's secure cloud,” she said.
“The big tech industry has benefited from our free market economies and now has to pitch back in and help democracies in some uncertain times.”
Cyber dimension
Whether through an ideological commitment to democracy or for more commercial reasons, Amazon is now embedded as a key technology partner for the AUKUS alliance countries.
The deal with Australia follows similar arrangements with the intelligence services of the U.K., the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA deal was the first and dates from 2014 as the agency moved to upgrade its technology so it could share information more easily and avoid the intelligence gaps that preceded the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.
The recent Australian deal shows that Amazon’s involvement has expanded to U.S. global allies, and the company is now as much a part of the defense establishment as it is of the corporate world.
It also demonstrates that any future global conflict will have a cyber dimension and that Governments need to lean on trusted technology partners for protection and preparedness.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Grandfailure
Lachlan Colquhoun
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their business models.