Google lands £400M MoD contract for secure UK cloud services The UK's Ministry of Defence has signed a £400 million ($540 million) contract with Google sovereign cloud to support security and analytics workloads. The arrangement promises Google AI, data analytics, and cybersecurity, all in sovereign datacenters built in the UK. Defense intelligence and national security specialists will …
The headlines suggest this is Google Cloud Platform, but in reality it is almost certainly their new standalone variant which has already found favour in Germany for their military.
On paper that’s an interesting and highly capable secure platform - but is also a physically chunky power hungry beast.
Well suited therefore for centralised defence type purposes in large UK datacentres or for point to point system links as the article suggests.
Definitely not a mobility or fast deployment cloud platform-l for use in theatre or on vehicle based models which in fact none of the mainstream hyperscalers can provide.
Such services do exist - and some are immensely capable, sufficiently secure for SECRET (and above) and very energy frugal; but these are not to be found from Google, AWS or Microsoft.
Might be covered by CLOUD Act yep - unless Google find a local company not under their ownership to run it.
With their GDC-AG product being able to run with not wider GCP connectivity that's pretty much what I think theyt will do and if so - its outside of the CLOUD Act entirely.
"physically chunky power hungry beast."
Funny how all the climate BS evaporates when the government want something. Has anyone added up the impact of Ukraine and Gaza, most oil consumption will be in rebuilding. But of course the planet doesn't matter when you want to see people dying. You'd think to save us all from boiling oceans there'd be more of a peace effort. No I don't believe CO2 is a threat.
That's dangerously naive. The "we hold the keys" argument only protects data at rest in a stable political climate. It completely ignores that in a crisis, the US government has the legal power to turn the entire AWS infrastructure into a hostile actor against its customers.
They can compel AWS to freeze our access, preventing us from deleting keys. They can compel AWS to help attack the encryption in transit. They could even, in the most extreme case, compel AWS to push a malicious software update to the very systems managing our keys.
Thinking a single cryptographic key makes us safe when a foreign superpower controls the entire physical and virtual environment our national secrets live in is a catastrophic failure of imagination. This deal outsources our sovereignty.
The US CLOUD Act together with the PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters mean that no computer system operated by a company based in the USA is sovereign to the country where it is installed. US law still has dominion over your data regardless of any empty promises to the opposite effect.
It would seem that the UK still believes that the USA is their ever faithful ally and that they don't mind sharing all their classified data with the US TLAs.
If, in the future, a UK government decides to act in a way which provokes the ire of either the mad orange king or what terror comes after him, they are setting themselves up for the ultimate blackmail.
Oh, you don't like our new tariffs on your exports? Let's see how you feel about that when we turn off your MoD datacentre.
This on the face of it appears gross stupidity, allowing control of military services to slip inexorably towards massive corporations. Each time a little more intrusion into operational capability. We're already well beyond just the NAAFI menu and shop. Public-Private partnership? That is essentially facism. Google are also ultimately under foreign control. America may be an ally, we work with them, but trust them, are we insane? We gave away most of our defence capability now we want to hand over the rest. There is enormous value in independence. Ask our US colleagues, they fought us for it and won.
