The focus on nurturing Australian innovation builds upon over a decade of AWS investments in the country.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has an enduring commitment to driving innovation, economic growth, and digital transformation across Australia, since establishing a local presence with the 2012 launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. Since then, it has collaborated closely with Australian public and private sector organisations to provide secure, reliable, and innovative cloud solutions, including the 2023 launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region.
“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,” said AWS in a press release. The partnership leverages AWS’s global experience, reliability, security, and performance, with local skilled personnel, the 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 release continued.
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.
Mission First Focus
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.
