https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/04/australia_aws_top_secret_cloud/
Interoperability with US infrastructure a big selling point
Well I would think that if the customer, in this case the Australian Signals Directorate, encrypted all data prior to going to AWS, it would be protected from any data mining that Amazon does.
I am sure that the ASD isn't just posting the information unencrypted on AWS or solely trusting Amazon's encryption where Amazon also has a copy of the key.
Well yes and no. For one there is lots of metadata like access times, the IPs that connect and their locations, traffic amount, etc.
But also like with all "cloud solutions" you are just outsourcing your uptime reliability issues. And for a system like that, im not sure outsourcing that is a great idea.
Yes that metadata can exist but can't that be obscured if AWS isn't connected to directly?
I think some of the technical details of how the ASD intends to ensure data protection/confidentiality/integrity are omitted for national security reasons.
It looks like it will be on prem, but then i dont even understand why they would involve amazon at all? Just use the existing public solutions. As soon as any major part of a system that is connected to the internet has proprietary code in it, you cant really trust it to protect secret information anymore.
It's won't be on-prem, but it will be dedicated data centres, built and run by Amazon, so almost the same as. Why? Because AWS runs better data centres than the gov ever could.
Gov is outsourcing the physical infrastructure risk, just like any other ocmpany that puts their stuff in the cloud.