Google Australia finally gets cloud added to certified govt list

Google Australia has finally landed on the Australian government’s certified cloud services list (CCSL), gaining permission to store and run unclassified workloads.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) said today that the Google Cloud Platform had been added, “increasing the options available to Australian government agencies.”

Google was the only large public cloud provider not on the list, but A/NZ country director for cloud Colin Timm told iTnews back in May the company had been working behind-the-scenes to change that.

“The ACSC concluded that the Google Cloud Platform met the necessary requirements and is suitable to host Australian government workloads to unclassified DLM in specified regions,” the ACSC said in a statement.

The operator is still a step behind rival Microsoft, which has achieved certification to run protected level workloads in a specific region of its public cloud.

“Google sought entry into the certification program for hosting data classified up to unclassified DLM.  Because of this Google was only assessed for this purpose,” the ACSC said today.

The ACSC’s decision certifies 16 Google cloud services and a physical data centre located in Sydney.

Some of the services that government can use include:

• Compute (Compute Engine, App Engine and Kubernetes Engine)
• Storage (Cloud Storage and Persistent Disk)
• Networking (Virtual Private Cloud, Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud DNS)
• Security (Cloud Key Management Service and Cloud IAM)
• Management (Stackdriver)
• Data Analytics (Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc and Cloud Datalab)
• Databases (Cloud SQL and Cloud Datastore).