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Improved private and hybrid cloud models are essential for maintaining the technological edge

The national security environment is deteriorating. Corporate and state-sponsored espionage, malicious cyber actors and hostile states pose a worsening threat to government and industry. As cyber resilience improves, hostile actors will increasingly target hardware, firmware and supply-chain vulnerabilities. And yet the need for national security agencies and their industry partners to collaborate  effectively across multiple levels of security classifications remains, in fact, it has deepened. The initial  response was to advocate a ‘cloud only’ operating model based on commercial hyperscalers, with the objective  to optimise strategic, corporate and military functions. However, an overreliance on these public cloud providers has resulted in spiralling IT costs and left many organisations struggling to meet requisite security, workforce and sovereignty demands. At the same time, private infrastructure solutions—including sensitive, air-gapped high-side environments—have remained integral to the mission and needs of many government and national security organisations.

SoftIron’s response to these challenges has been to pioneer a new generation of hybrid cloud technologies.

HyperCloud gives government and industry clients the tools to manage their own sensitive data securely, simply and on their own premises.

 

Secure by Design

SoftIron has embedded security as a fundamental element of the system design of HyperCloud through a principle we call Secure Provenance. In accordance with internationally recognised security controls, HyperCloud sets new standards for reducing the potential number of security vulnerabilities while also increasing the ease for timely patches and updates. HyperCloud’s reductive architecture rethinks the anatomy of a cloud. SoftIron’s secure programming practices ensure that all software code in HyperCloud is compiled from open source or written by SoftIron engineers.

 

HyperCloud’s task-specific compute, storage and interconnect hardware is 100% designed, manufactured and assembled by SoftIron in Australia  and the US. Across its technology stack, HyperCloud supports a completely transparent audit of its design, manufacturing process, supply chain and individual components to verify its unique approach to secure by design principles.

As a result, HyperCloud has a reduced attack surface, is simpler to audit and secure, and is radically easier to operate, update and maintain.

Hyperscale public cloud simplicity for sovereign private and hybrid deployments

HyperCloud delivers hyperscale public cloud simplicity, allowing agencies to derive advantage and critically enable sovereign cloud and data sovereignty initiatives, without relying on foreign companies with opaque processes and complex contractual obligations. Using our one technology, one fleet approach, HyperCloud provides agility, infinite scalability and standardisation for private and sovereign cloud deployments.

With respect to hybrid deployments, HyperCloud delivers a platform for virtualised and containerised workloads across multiple federated on-premises zones and public clouds, with support for secure multi-tenancy, full programmability, and full lifecycle automation. The ability to federate clouds across domains means application owners can centrally manage their application lifecycle but deploy seamlessly across any number of sites with consistency even at the edge. Users can orchestrate rapid scaling and descaling of applications between private and public infrastructure—without typical lock-in restraints—from a single interface. And control of the networking stack along with dedicated storage helps with reining in IOPS charges.

All of these benefits are compiled within completely sovereign infrastructure: Built, maintained and owned locally on your terms.

Designed to run in denied environments and at the tactical edge

For air-gapped networks with sensitive and classified workloads, HyperCloud is unique in that it is designed to provide cloud services while detached from any other network. In other words, the on-demand self-service, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured services in HyperCloud are available in a fully contained environment. Furthermore, the solution has pre-integrated building blocks with automated assimilation, which creates a natively resilient cloud environment that can tolerate more component failure and be set up in a couple of hours, rather than days.

HyperCloud can autonomously install security and maintenance updates. Routine maintenance tasks are handled through a single, highly intuitive user interface which means if you need to expand it while deployed on a mission, any IT generalist will have the  skill set to do it.

And because our appliances are designed to be highly efficient, you can deliver a fully functioning cloud environment in 8U running on less than 2KW of power, turning any suitably secure location with a standard electrical circuit into an edge environment.