The Department of Defence has revealed more detail on the diverse multi-vendor ‘Secret’ Cloud Services it is seeking, including the need to “rapidly establish” infrastructure with deals potentially being signed by the end of the year.
In an approach to market for Tranche One released on Wednesday, Defence said it is seeking expressions of interest over the next month. Collaboration will occur up to October before a request for offer in the fourth quarter.
The focus of the first tranche is to “rapidly establish a foundational Secret IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service] cloud service”.
The cloud service for Secret-level data, is for data which may have an extreme business impact or risk serious damage to the national interest, organisations or individuals.
Defence currently restricts Secret-level data to its secret level networks but wants to apply cloud technologies to it to improve the “speed and agility with which new capabilities can be developed in response to an ever evolving and complex threat landscape”.
The Secret Cloud Services are expected to be used by the Department of Defence, Home Affairs and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but may also be opened up to other agencies.
Tranche One may be deployed as a minimum viable product, but needs to address two use cases.
The first is enterprise hosting of data and information at the Secret level that can be scaled to satisfy demand across geographically dispersed locations.
The second use case is ingesting large payloads like sensory, imagery and audio data, as well as high volume payloads for “processing, analysing and disseminating sensitive information to decision makers when needed”.
Trance Two is planned to expand tranche one services and add more cloud service providers and platform as a service (PaaS), as well as progress into prototyping, information sharing and edge computing. It is expected to commence in H1 next year.
Tranche Three will add Software as a Service (SaaS), communication and collaboration, unified communications, and enterprise and business “value add” capabilities, and is planned to commence in H2 next year.
Defence has asked to engage with cloud service providers that operate cloud services, rather than system integrators or cloud implementation companies, but expects subcontracting will be needed for establishment, accreditation and operation of the Secret cloud services.
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There is only one current provider that could deliver that, and their name does not start with A or M.