The shift toward a better understanding of cybersecurity, data protection and sovereign capability has intensified as the COVID19 pandemic, subsequent digital transformation and global supply chain issues have exposed vulnerabilities in the nation’s collective ability to be economically resilient and cyber secure.
While Australia has always been aligned with the five eyes intelligence alliance these elements have shocked us into a new understanding of what “sovereign capability” means, according to Oracle vice-president and chief technology officer Nathan Cook from the company’s National Security and Defence JAPAC & EMEA regions.
Mr Cook says both public and private sector organisations are asking more questions about what “sovereign capability looks like for their own agency or organisation.
“They are being asked to ensure that they are future-proofing and thinking critically about where data is based and stored. While it may not be a requirement today, it might be a requirement tomorrow.”
He cited this month’s federal budget which earmarked $42.4 million to improve security arrangements to assist critical infrastructure owners to respond to cyberattacks, and also the announcement of the establishment of a new office to remove key supply chain vulnerabilities.
Relatively new player to the public sector cloud services market, Oracle has worked with Australian Data Centres (ADC) to deploy its Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud @Customer (DRCC) capability into the Canberra region, specifically designed for the federal government.
An Oracle DRCC is identical to Oracle’s commercial clouds, providing a zero-trust architecture, enterprise-grade, fully managed, hyperscale Cloud capability that can be deployed into specified data centres to meet a government’s sovereign hosting, management, security and regulatory needs.
Government users will be able to access the ADC facility through the highly secure Intra-government Communications Network (ICON), as well as the services of all major telecommunication providers.
ADC Director Rob Kelly said: “The government has mandated that certain types of data are required to be housed either by a cloud provider or directly by a data centre in a Certified Strategic Data Centre which is the top level of sovereignty in the industry.”
ADC has invested in Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, and will be able to offer the complete portfolio of Oracle’s public cloud services and Oracle Fusion SaaS applications, but dedicated to government clients.
Mr Kelly said: “There are a number of current projects with some very large, all-of-government type applications looking to build proof of concepts on the public cloud. If those are successful, they will go into production in the dedicated region cloud.”
“Customers now want choice in their cloud providers. They want to decide which application works best on which platform provided by which cloud provider and then consume that application that suits their business outcomes.”
“ADC has an intermediation layer that enables the customer to choose any public cloud for any workload they want to run in the cloud. We automate a lot of the processes; build templates to suit the customer’s requirement, and provide a single view of consumption, budget and costs. They get one bill from us with full transparency across all their cloud services.”
This article was produced as a partnership between InnovationAus, Oracle and Intel. If you would like to know more about Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer click here.
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