Amazon Web Services (AWS) will establish a sovereign Top Secret (TS) Cloud in Australia to deliver resilient information, communication and technology (ICT) services for the Australian Government, generating up to 2,000 local Australian jobs.

The TS Cloud will be purpose-built for Australia’s Defence and National Intelligence Community agencies to securely host our 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.

The joint initiative offers significant opportunities for Australian industry. It will see AWS engage Australian businesses to design and build the TS Cloud, driving innovation and job creation in cybersecurity, data analytics and cloud computing.

Australia’s defence industry will see additional benefits with new opportunities to deliver and integrate new capabilities using these cloud services.

The government plans to invest at least $2 billion over the next decade into the program.

“The Top Secret Cloud with Amazon Web Services in Australia will provide a state-of-the-art collaborative space for our intelligence and defence community to store and access top secret data,” said the Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate, Rachel Noble. 

“This will transform how we work together as agencies and partners,” she added.