{"id":61456,"date":"2020-12-18T14:35:54","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T03:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=61456"},"modified":"2020-12-18T14:36:34","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T03:36:34","slug":"what-australias-intelligence-community-wants-for-christmas-a-secure-private-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/what-australias-intelligence-community-wants-for-christmas-a-secure-private-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"What Australia\u2019s intelligence community wants for Christmas: a secure private cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Christmas sometimes brings presents you don\u2019t expect\u2014this year, for me, an excitingly titled \u2018Request for expressions of interest<\/a>\u2019 that appeared on AusTender is one of them. It\u2019s about Australia\u2019s peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Intelligence, beginning an essential, radical and rapid shift into cloud applications and services at the highly classified top secret level of capability. That\u2019s big news.<\/p>\n

It\u2019d be interesting but not so important if this approach were just about ONI, but it\u2019s not. The AusTender documentation says the aim is for all 10 agencies that make up Australia\u2019s national intelligence community to be part of a highly secure private cloud.<\/p>\n

This is a recognition of two things by ONI\u2014and no doubt by the prime minister (whose portfolio includes ONI) and cabinet\u2019s National Security Committee. The simple power of cloud services and software is essential for Australia\u2019s intelligence agencies if they are to remain capable actors in today\u2019s technological environment. And a secure private cloud across the 10 agencies maximises the ability to combine their top secret, secret and open-source datasets. Both things were at the heart of the ASPI report<\/a> John Coyne and Albert Zhang wrote with me back in May.<\/p>\n

That shows a foundational understanding that Australia\u2019s intelligence agencies can only retain their ability to give the Australian government \u2018insight advantages\u2019 over others by combining the unique classified datasets collected by agencies with open-source data everyone else can access. Doing this involves using new analytic tools and techniques to complement the expert human analyst approaches that are common across the intelligence world.<\/p>\n

The request from ONI puts this pretty simply, saying, \u2018The NIC is seeking to accelerate its ability to transpose and extract relevant data from complex data sources. It sees common toolsets for data filtering and manipulation to extract relevant useful information as a force multiplier.\u2019 It later notes that the private cloud will need to use robust cross-domain processes to shift data\u2014and applications\u2014from the \u2018low\u2019 unclassified side to the \u2018high\u2019 side to work with classified data and applications.<\/p>\n

Conceptually, ONI understands that the advantage of any private cloud approach comes in part from aligning it to the \u2018public cloud\u2019 services and approaches used much more widely. That\u2019s because it allows interesting software applications and other innovations developed in the wider world to be moved rapidly into the intelligence agencies\u2019 systems, after verification around security. ONI calls this being able to develop on the low side and apply on the high side, to allow our intelligence agencies to take advantage of rapid change in the external technological environment. This will help any initial private cloud system remain capable over time.<\/p>\n

The concept of aligning with approaches used at scale in the wider world continues into how this powerful new infrastructure and software as a service will be purchased. It\u2019s refreshing to see the Australian government moving ICT procurement out of the \u2018boom and bust\u2019 capital procurement world, where a large upfront investment gets companies to build big systems and then the government ekes the capability out of legacy systems over an extended period, before recapitalising at scale and doing the whole thing again.<\/p>\n

Instead, ONI wants a minimal upfront cost, with payment for cloud applications and services being made as personnel in agencies \u2018consume\u2019 them. And it wants the charges for this demand-driven approach to \u2018align\u2019 with the costs of cloud services in the wider world.<\/p>\n

ONI has clearly also looked at and learned from the experiences of cloud users elsewhere in the Australian government and of Five Eyes partners like the US and UK. So, it\u2019s deliberately not after one big proprietary partner that delivers the cloud infrastructure, services and all the software. Instead, at least at the services level, it wants the \u2018multivendor\u2019 approach that the US and UK have both moved towards for software and apps, where these tools are provided by third-party developers to be used by intelligence agencies on the new cloud platform.<\/p>\n

The news is good for Australian sovereignty. Any provider has to deliver a solution that is hosted in Australia, geographically dispersed, and able to operate disconnected from the wider world, with this managed by holders of Australian security clearances. That\u2019s not a trivial requirement for \u2018hyperscale\u2019 global cloud providers, as it means they can\u2019t build a solution around software and services flowing to other parts of the globe using their dispersed technical infrastructure without Australian agency control or visibility.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s a low-key reference to something that should have not just Australian human intelligence operators in a place like the Australian Secret Intelligent Service interested, but also have the attention of the huge defence organisation. The AusTender document talks about a priority being \u2018edge computing\u2019. That term wraps up a lot. It\u2019s about this cloud approach going mobile, not just being for Canberra HQ. And so it probably means baking 5G-type functionality into the intelligence community\u2019s technology base.<\/p>\n

So far, only 5G technology (and 6 or 7G in the future) can really deliver the powerful edge computing capabilities ONI seems to want for the intelligence agencies. And that type of capability is exactly what Defence needs to release the power of its huge data pools and deliver combat effects for a military that needs to be mobile and present across our region. So, any aspiring providers of this new secure private cloud will need to have designed their approach to work with 5G as a core design principle\u2014and if it delivers, there\u2019s a much larger market for the approach in Australia\u2019s wider national security community.<\/p>\n

What might go wrong or be an obstacle to delivering the effects that this new approach promises? As usual, the big risks are not about technologies or systems but about the people using them. In this case, there\u2019s a risk that the multi-tenant approach ONI is asking for could result in individual agencies building big \u2018private rooms\u2019 in the intelligence community cloud and doing less than they should in the collaborative\u2014family room\u2014part of the cloud.<\/p>\n

You can see that\u2019s a real risk if you have waded through much of the Tolstoy-length intelligence review<\/a> released earlier this month, which observes, \u2018Too often, Australian agencies look over the fence and want what another agency has so that they can, effectively, do their own thing in isolation of others.\u2019<\/p>\n

Overcoming that tendency is a matter for leadership: agency heads across the national intelligence community need to show by personal example that they get the essential ideas that this new approach from ONI brings\u2014even as it means their individual agency \u2018silos of excellence\u2019 must cede some control (and a lot of data) for the common good.<\/p>\n

ONI has given potential providers a busy Christmas, because it wants responses by 8 February and then seems ready to run a rapid procurement process from there. While that may be putting pressure on providers\u2019 holidays, I\u2019m pretty sure that the refreshing and well-crafted approach ONI is taking will be recognised, and may even bring a bit of Christmas joy to the staid worlds of ICT and government contracting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christmas sometimes brings presents you don\u2019t expect\u2014this year, for me, an excitingly titled \u2018Request for expressions of interest\u2019 that appeared on AusTender is one of them. It\u2019s about Australia\u2019s peak intelligence agency, the Office of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":61458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[343,483],"class_list":["post-61456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australian-intelligence-community","tag-cloud-computing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Australia\u2019s intelligence community wants for Christmas: a secure private cloud | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/what-australias-intelligence-community-wants-for-christmas-a-secure-private-cloud\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Australia\u2019s intelligence community wants for Christmas: a secure private cloud | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christmas sometimes brings presents you don\u2019t expect\u2014this year, for me, an excitingly titled \u2018Request for expressions of interest\u2019 that appeared on AusTender is one of them. 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