Rackspace authorised to host Aussie government data

The Australian Cyber Security Centre has approved Rackspace's infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service to host government data up to the unclassified level.

Rackspace's Dedicated Hosting Environment (DHE) offers customers dedicated virtualised or physical compute capabilities, which also includes storage, networking and databases.

ACSC acting head Lynn Moore said Rackspace applied for entry into the certification program up to unclassified for DHE, and as such was only assessed for that purpose.

"We applied our rigorous assessment process to check Rackspace DHE’s ability to meet the expected security standards," said Moore.

"The Rackspace DHE environment in Australia consists of three data halls in Sydney. Data hall 140 meets the required physical security for hosting unclassified DLM data and is the recommended data hall for Commonwealth entities to use."

Commenting on the certification, Rackspace general manager Darryn McCoskery said:

“As one of only 13 companies to achieve this certification, this is a great achievement for the Australian Rackspace team and will open up many exciting new opportunities in 2019. We’re thrilled to be working with the government towards achieving their commitment to a cloud-first policy that supports the digital transformation of the public sector.

"Joining the Certified Cloud Services List for unclassified workloads is a testament to the extensive capabilities of our Dedicated Hosting Environment and demonstrates the trust our customers have in our ability to securely and efficiently manage their cloud workloads.”

Rackspace joins a growing list of cloud providers that have recently been added to the Certified Cloud Services List (CCSL), which is required for companies that want to sell cloud services to the federal government and its departments.

Other cloud providers that can host data up to the unclassified level includes Amazon Web Services, Dell Virtustream, Education Services Australia, Google, IBM, Salesforce and ServiceNow.

So far, only five cloud providers have been approved to host data at the Protected classification level: Vault Systems, Sliced Tech, Microsoft, Macquarie Government and Dimension Data.