The Belgian Army is planning to migrate some of its workloads to the cloud next year.
First reported by De Morgen, Belgium's Minister of Defense Theo Francken said that Army will be reducing its use of data centers and moving some of its operations to the cloud.
Francken has made €61 million ($69m) available to the Army to improve its "cyber protection," of which moving to the cloud is one of three projects the money is being set aside for.
“The reality is harsh. Belgium has repeatedly been the target of sophisticated cyber attacks. The consequences of such attacks are only increased by the presence of international institutions in our country,” said Francken.
He added that this investment has become "a pure necessity" by 2025.
Belgium is home to the NATO headquarters and the military command center, SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Partners Europe).
It's hoped the cloud migration will help support those cyber protection goals, with De Morgen noting that many other foreign armed forces have made similar choices, and that "cyber specialists" suggest data in the cloud is less vulnerable to attacks than that in "classic data centers," with automatic software updates also less at risk of human error.
The remaining funding will be used to support the development of a multisource threat analysis platform and the expansion of monitoring tools across non-classified defense networks.
Information about the Belgian army's current data center footprint or its planned cloud environment has not been shared,
Countries that have embraced cloud computing for at least part of their defense department operations include the US, Australia, and the UK. In October 2024, the US Department of Defense awarded Amazon Web Services (AWS) a $7.2m contract for a virtual private cloud pilot.
Earlier that year, Amazon scored a contract to develop a data center and cloud system with the Australian Government to handle top-secret information from agencies including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.
Meanwhile, the UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) put out a request for "Expressions of Interest" for a managed service provider for its Enterprise IT Platform in a contract valued between £45m ($58.25m) and £60m ($77.67m) in August 2024.
This followed the MOD's release of a cloud strategy in February 2023, which set out an "explicit intent to coordinate and accelerate the most ambitious plans for hyperscale cloud adoption across Defence." In September 2023, DCD reported that the department was experiencing issues caused by its aging IT systems.
