The Department of Defence has unveiled their Defence Digital Strategy and Roadmap 2024, a comprehensive plan to modernise and scale the functionality of the digital backbone of entire armed forces. Per the department website, the roadmap seeks to highlight “the critical role that digital technology plays in defending Australia and its national interests,” and to improve the overall digital competence, capability, and security of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This involves a near complete overhaul of the ADF’s IT infrastructure, seeking to base much of the Force’s IT infrastructure in the cloud.
Strategy
The cornerstone of the ADF’s new digital strategy is partnerships with hyperscalers to outsource cloud IT infrastructure, software development, and maintenance. Maintaining large-scale IT systems is an expensive endeavour fraught with complexity. The ADF requires a myriad of very specialised digital solutions for storing, working with, and transmitting a wide variety of different types of data: real-time battlefield communications, military intelligence, targeting data for missiles or artillery, information about equipment operation and maintenance, live video feeds for drone pilots…the list is seemingly endless. All of these systems have unique requirements for data storage, transmission, and user interface, and employing a workforce to build and maintain digital infrastructure on such a massive scale would be an enormous undertaking for any entity, even one of the ADF’s size and stature.
Partnering with hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services allows the ADF to take advantage of existing economies of scale. Amazon has already built just about every type of data storage solution and user interface for that data that anyone could imagine — including militaries. Instead of starting from scratch and having to reinvent the wheel, the ADF is benefitting from the decades of experience that Amazon has building digital infrastructure for other militaries.
Implications
The department states that its “technology choices are defined by Defence’s strategies and missions,” citing nine guiding principles for its digital transformation. While they provide a solid yet simplified framework with which to understand the Strategy, the language used to outline these principles requires a bit of decoding using the full context of the Roadmap to understand fully.
- “Best-in-class global platforms supported by best-in-class sovereign capability” — this emphasises that, while the ADF is willing to embrace foreign suppliers in order to secure access to the best IT systems available, it will insist upon maintaining sovereign control over those systems, and ensure that Australia possesses world-class domestic capability to operate them, supported by a host of small and medium-sized managed IT providers to ensure resilience and redundancy in the domestic IT talent base.
- “Supporting rapid acquisition and iterative deployment” — the ADF wants to acquire and deploy the latest capabilities rapidly as they become available, adopting some systems incrementally as they provide and refine new capabilities. Iterative deployment of IT systems — often a hallmark of adoption of systems built using the Agile product development methodology, which is mentioned in the Roadmap — involves a cyclical feedback process wherein vendors (in this case hyperscalers) respond to the demands of the customer (the ADF) during the deployment of a new system. This provides the customer some time to adapt to the new system and request changes or adjustments according to their operating needs, creating a flywheel of constant innovation and improvement that often leads to the development of new capabilities.
- “Supporting a cloud-only platform strategy, leveraging hyperscaler capabilities” — the ADF wants to focus fully on cloud-based platforms in order to maximise interoperability between its own systems, as well as those of allies like the UK and US.
- “Cyber-secure and threat aware by design, in compliance with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) Essential 8 and Information Security Manual (ISM)” — these systems will all comply with the ADF’s existing cyber security standards, and are built from the ground up to be as secure as possible.
- “Continuously improving Defence’s cyber posture and resilience, while increasing system performance and reliability” — one of the ADF’s biggest reasons for choosing to work with hyperscalers on cloud infrastructure is to ensure that they are constantly taking advantage of state of the art systems that hyperscalers will upgrade to unprompted, given that it is in their commercial interests to do so.
- “Reducing technical debt – leveraging Moore’s Law constantly, while representing value for money” — this reflects a similar message as principle 5: ensuring that the ADF is always taking advantage of the latest hardware. Moore’s Law is the observed tendency of the semiconductor industry to double the performance of computer chips roughly every two years. Hyperscalers are always upgrading their hardware to ensure that they remain competitive, ensuring that the ADF’s systems will run on the newest, fastest server chips available, and won’t be held back by dating, obsolete hardware.
- “Based on open architecture and open standards” — there are a variety of open standards that this could refer to, from using Open RAN for interoperable and multi-vendor private 5G networks to a wide variety of open source software systems. Running defence infrastructure on Linux, an open-source operating system, would ensure the most up to date security underpinning the ADF’s computing systems, and utilising open-source development frameworks like React.js would ensure implementation of industry standard software development best practices and promote interoperability with other systems developed using those frameworks.
- “Enabling interoperability with our military partners for a data driven approach” — encouraging interoperability with allied nations, especially the US and UK, is clearly a driving factor in working with hyperscalers. Given that the ADF largely relies on American hardware already, and would potentially be dependent upon US military aid and cooperation in the event of conflict, it makes sense to ensure interoperability with American defence systems.
- “Delivering digital capabilities through single mission centric functional platforms ensuring there is no duplication of ICT capability” — by centralising Defence IT platforms in an outsourced cloud provider, the ADF can easily ensure that it is not wasting time developing parallel systems, and that different branches can easily take advantage of platforms developed according to Australian standards without creating duplicate hardware or software systems.
Why Now?
The ADF clearly states in the Roadmap that the adoption of modern cloud IT infrastructure is driven by the “relentless pace of technology advancement” and the need to “remain agile in our approach to planning and delivering digital capability across the enterprise.” With technology changing as quickly as it does these days, it would be difficult for any entity to keep up with the pace of innovation without harnessing the economies of scale provided by companies that focus on technological modernisation.
Lessons Learned
We can all take a lesson from the ADF. While businesses of many sizes have long relied on in-house IT and local servers to manage business workloads, any company doing so at this point in time is doomed to fall behind if they do not have the funding to constantly update both hardware and software infrastructure that they rely on. With the advancement of semiconductor technology, artificial intelligence, communications networks, and internet platforms changing the way we live more and more rapidly with each passing year, it would behove any business to embrace the speed of change. No matter the business you’re in, solid strategies are important for all aspects of your digital operations. Details as small as finding local services you can trust, and that suit your needs, like Melbourne web development, are crucial to bigger plans. It may be time to consider migrating business systems from legacy software hosted locally, into modern cloud-native platforms hosted by specialised companies that can not only afford to modernise constantly and remain as secure as possible, but indeed must do so in order to retain their competitive stance in their own industries.
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