Australia has confirmed it is actively investigating building the country's own top-secret cloud platform to host intelligence data.
In an official announcement, the director general of the country's national intelligence agency, Andrew Shearer, expressed his hope that the initiative will transform the way intelligence agencies operate and enhance cooperation within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which consists of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, will improve. Great Britain and the US.
Britain and the US already have their own clouds, suggesting Australia could learn a thing or two from their experiences.
The Australian intelligence cloud will connect to other countries
The country's new cloud infrastructure will be designed with interoperability in mind so that it can function with existing intelligence clouds in other countries, enabling near-instantaneous data sharing. It is hoped that this will allow the three countries, and others that later launch similar programs, to better coordinate their responses to global security challenges.
At an event hosted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, DC, Shearer noted: “What that will do is obviously change the way we do our work as agencies, but it will also open up a shared collaborative space that really, I think we need to strengthen this sense of working together as a real community and use all those different capabilities to tackle problems.”
The importance of shared standards was also highlighted when Shearer commented on artificial intelligence, suggesting that security analysts in particular are concerned about the limitations of AI, but that it could offer enormous potential for intelligence gathering and analysis.
In addition to the Five Eyes, Australia is also expanding its intelligence involvement with other nearby Southeast Asian countries and Japan. Shearer also hinted at deeper engagement with a number of European countries whose priorities align with Australia's – a sentiment that has become clearer since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Through The register