07 February 2023

UK MoD publishes first defence cloud road map

by Olivia Savage & Anika Torruella

The CIRRUS MoD cloud delivery model from the Cloud Strategic Roadmap that seeks to join the dots within Defence Digital and across the wider defence landscape. (MoD Crown Copyright 2023)

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has published the first edition of its ‘Cloud Strategic Roadmap for Defence'.

Released on 2 February, the road map outlines the vision, deliverables, and outcomes for achieving a “hyperscale cloud ecosystem” designed to span across all MoD “functions, commands, and enabling organisations”. This is intended to provide the foundation for future capabilities and drive emerging technology adoption in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, analytics, machine learning, robotics, and synthetics.

The hyperscale cloud will consolidate and rationalise existing capabilities across various MoD classifications, in addition to designing new capabilities to offer a “single service across defence, through the delivery vehicle, CIRRUS (cohered delivery model)”. The delivery model aims to provide clear roles and accountability as well as structure to drive the UK's defence cloud activities, the MoD said.

The road map details several underlining objectives that will be accomplished by the 2025 timeframe. These include data centre rationalisation (DCR), which will involve the decommissioning of legacy systems to support MoD migration to the new hyperscale cloud; creating a hyperscale cloud service across all departments, domains, and classifications; and developing a hyperscale SECRET cloud service to enable data sharing, with similar capabilities considered for TOP SECRET.

The MoD will build upon the established “hyperscale cloud services at the OFFICIAL level and increase the maturity and evolution of MODCloud” to deliver the SECRET and TOP SECRET cloud requirements, with a view to ensuring the appropriate mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has published the first edition of its ‘Cloud Strategic Roadmap for...

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