Australia’s top-secret intelligence data will be migrated to the cloud under a $2 billion deal with Amazon.com Inc‘s AMZN cloud service Amazon Web Services. This decision is expected to enhance the country’s defense force interoperability with the United States.
What Happened: The Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s national security agency, will also increase its use of artificial intelligence to analyze data as part of this transition. The plan includes the construction of top-secret data centers in Australia, reported Reuters on Thursday.
Defense Minister Richard Marles stated that the move to cloud services provided by Amazon will provide greater resilience to data supporting the defense force. This will ensure a common computing operating environment with the U.S. defense forces in the future.
“Artificial intelligence is an important game changer for all of us in the intelligence community, and we are working to embrace the use of it in an ethical, well governed and well understood manner, where we understand very carefully when we bring AI tools into our environment how are they being used, what are they doing to the data and do we understand how carefully they need to be governed?” The Director General of the Australian Signals Directorate, Rachel Noble, said in Canberra on Thursday.
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Director-General of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, emphasized that interoperability with security partners such as the United States is a priority. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also highlighted the potential of the partnership to upgrade national security capabilities and create 2,000 local jobs.
Why It Matters: This move by the Australian government comes at a time when AWS has been expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. In June, Amazon announced plans to invest billions in Taiwan to establish data centers and expand its cloud services. This was seen as a move to meet the region’s increasing demand for cloud services.
However, AWS has also faced criticism, with protesters demanding the termination of a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government. The protest took place during a conference organized by Amazon’s cloud division, highlighting the increasing scrutiny on the company’s business practices.
Moreover, Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk recently expressed amazement at the revenue generated by AWS, noting its trailing 12-month revenue of $94.4 billion, which surpasses that of 466 companies in the S&P 500 index.
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This story was generated using Benzinga Neuro and edited by Kaustubh Bagalkote
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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