Page 40 - Australian Defence Magazine Nov 2018

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CLOUD
“A community cloud is essentially a cloud where it’s more than one private customer but it’s not public.”
security standards,” Taylor-Price said. “We’re the only people in the world that made that investment. That’s a massive investment that we had to make into achieve that, and then collaborated with ASD to have them come and certify and basically verify that we’ve implemented that correctly.”
This significant time and dollar R&D in- vestment for the SME has begun to pay off. The three-year process has seen Vault access $350 million in capital funding and provide services to a number of government clients that can be assured that the system meets the stringent security levels mandated by ASD.
“Because at the time no clouds were certi- fied, the level of assurance they wanted from us was very high, and so we didn’t go and build to the majority of security controls, we built to all security controls,” Taylor-Price said. “It was 100 per cent built to the government security controls that were relevant to cloud.”
“That’s really what’s unique about our approach,” Tony Mercado, Vault’s General Manager said. “We’ve started at the top and worked down, rather than start at the bot- tom and worked up.”
Tangibles
When talking about clouds it’s easy to forget that physical infrastructure still has to un- derpin the technology. Vault has four clouds in two geographical regions ; two in Sydney and two in Canberra. These are all in highly -rated secure facilities. These in turn are sup- ported by two offices, one in Sydney and the other in the middle of Canberra’s CBD.
“The cloud technology piece is the mas- sive piece of R&D that happened but the physical one is probably more tangible for people. So if you were to say look at that door behind the glass door, you’d notice that it’s a steel framed door, it opens outwards, so it’s
exactly designed around the protective security policy framework; the sensors that we’ve got for the alarms and the alarm systems and the entry access control, they’re all government certified, evaluated products.
“Then if we go across there, through the Vault Academy, through the experience centre, be- hind that back wall over there, there’s a Zone 5 top secret designed security operations cen- tre. And so if you just think of the wall itself, firstly it’s air gapped, so when you go in you go through multiple airlocks to air gap it and then the walls themselves, they’re 14 layers of material thick, including metal sheets; solid plywood, then ballistics, ballistic gels and acoustic absorbing materials because then the data inside can be virtually assured to be, when we’re monitoring our environment nationally, that environment is then assured to be secure and so it’s those sorts of things, the differences between a community cloud built for government security requirements
and a public cloud.”
According to Taylor-Price a challenge
the public clouds have is they will never build a specific requirement for the Aus- tralian market just because the Australian market is too small.
“The security requirements for Australia are specific, they’re non-globally distributed mod- els, it is with security cleared staff, with Austra- lian citizens and so that’s why you’ve got this whole tier of cloud providers in the communi- ty cloud space in Australia and you don’t have the global providers playing in to that space.”
Working in the government space, the company is not able to talk about many of the contracts and activities they undertake for Defence and related agencies. One it can talk about however is providing cloud for Air Services Australia this year. The
$160 million 10- year contract to provide secure cloud to the agency, the biggest move to cloud government has ever seen, was an- nounced in April this year. The systems is now up and running, three floors of serv- ers and datacentres have been closed down in the Air Services building. And it was all done in less than six months.
“On our side we actually saw 400 gigabits per second of data writing to our storage network, that was used for that one move,” Taylor-Price outlined to ADM. “These large scale or hyper-scale cloud moves can actually be done. I’m not saying necessarily all Aus- tralian sovereign clouds could do this but certainly Vault has the capability to deliver on those large scale projects. We’re really not pitching for small stuff; we are pitching for the major pieces of work, the transformative pieces of work.”
Sovereignty
Once again, Taylor-Price highlights the sov- ereignty piece of the Vault offering.
“I’m not talking about sovereignty of data here but sovereignty of capability, much like a country would want energy sovereignty and food sovereignty, it should also want technol- ogy sovereignty and having sovereign compa- nies that underpin Defence at times of war is critical. To build up that sovereignty within Australia, it’s a critical time now because if the Australian government doesn’t invest in sovereign capability now, all of the sovereign capability will dwindle, all of the multina- tional capability will grow and you can’t just suddenly in five years time as a government say, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had sov- ereignty. It’s an ecosystem that needs to be built over decades and the growth is there, it’s happening. It does actually take a concerted effort from government to support sovereign capability to make it happen. Without a con- scious effort by government, I think you’ll ac- tually see a decline in sovereign capability and that will be to the long term detriment of the country and national security.”
Given the reputation IT programs have for schedule and cost overruns, Taylor-Price is humble about the success of the company thus far.
“100 per cent of projects we’ve delivered to date, that we know of anyway, have been a success,” he confirmed to ADM. “All of the defence and intelligence workloads that have come to us have all finished with a suc- cess. We’re not saying we’re great on our own but our partners working with us, de- livering to government, today, I would say we’ve had a phenomenal success rate.”
40 | November 2018 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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