Australia's national hyperscale cloud - the first certified to hold the government's most classified data, and it never leaves the country.
Most cloud companies start with scale and add security later. Vault Cloud did the opposite. Founded in Canberra in 2012 by Rupert Taylor-Price, it set out to answer a narrow, stubborn question: where does Australia's most sensitive government data actually live, and who can be compelled to touch it? The answer became a business. Vault was the first cloud certified by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) for classified government systems, and it has spent more than a decade turning that head start into a moat.
The pitch is unusually literal. Vault Cloud is 100% Australian-owned and operated - the entire company, including its data centres, offices and security-cleared support staff, sits within Australia and under Australian jurisdiction. There is no offshore region to opt out of, no foreign parent that a court elsewhere could lean on. For a government agency worried about who can legally reach into a system, that is the whole product. Sovereignty here is not a marketing region; it is the architecture.
Vault's customers are the organisations that cannot afford a mistake: Australian federal and state government agencies, law enforcement, the Department of Defence, defence primes and the wider defence supply chain, plus regulated critical-infrastructure operators across banking, health, energy, transport, communications and water.
These buyers share a problem the global hyperscalers only partly solve. Their data is classified - PROTECTED, SECRET, in some cases TOP SECRET - and it is governed by strict Australian controls plus, increasingly, allied requirements. Data sovereignty, security clearance of the humans with access, and physical control of the facility all matter as much as uptime.
Vault's answer is to make compliance the default state rather than a configuration a customer has to get right. The Australian Government's security controls are built into and automated across the platform, so an agency inherits them instead of assembling them. That shifts risk off the customer and onto infrastructure that was certified for exactly this job.
The AUKUS era sharpens the challenge. As the company has put it, a single system may need to satisfy US, UK and Australian rules simultaneously - a compliance puzzle most providers never attempt. Vault has positioned itself to help provide the digital backbone for Australia's future nuclear-powered submarine fleet.
Secure cloud for federal, state and local agencies, law enforcement and defence, with Australian Government controls automated by default.
Hyperscale capacity for banking, health, energy, transport, water and communications operators needing high assurance.
Monitored, certified gateway giving classified networks controlled, defensible access to the internet.
Environment certified for SECRET and higher workloads, expanded via the 2024 National Reconstruction Fund investment.
Controlled, audited data transfer between security domains of differing classification levels.
Container-as-a-Service on OpenStack, Kubernetes and Rancher for secure, modern application delivery.
Sovereign backup and disaster recovery held entirely within Australian data centres.
Sovereign cloud stack for on-premise, pre-production and air-gapped environments.
Training and enablement for the verified community of partners building on the platform.
Global hyperscalers offer Australian regions; few match all four sovereignty dimensions at once. This is an illustrative read of where Vault concentrates its advantage - legal and personnel sovereignty, not just where the servers sit.
Bars are indicative of positioning rather than audited benchmarks. Competitors include AWS (and its Australian sovereign/classified regions), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and local providers such as AUCloud, Sliced Tech and Macquarie Government.
Vault runs a B2B and business-to-government infrastructure-as-a-service model: subscription and consumption-based access to its sovereign hyperscale cloud, layered with managed security services and gateways. Its ASD and IRAP certifications are the commercial engine - they take years to earn, which limits competition and supports pricing power in a market where trust is the product.
The company pairs open-source cloud engineering - an OpenStack architecture, Kubernetes, Ceph and Rancher - with deep national-security domain knowledge. Its board includes a former Department of Defence CIO and a former ADF Academy Commandant, while the executive team spans FinTech, SaaS and secure digital transformation. It runs on hyperscale hardware: Intel Xeon CPUs, NVMe SSDs and AI/ML accelerators.
Rupert Taylor-Price starts Vault Systems to build a cloud purpose-built for Australian government security.
Vault becomes the first cloud certified by the Australian Signals Directorate for classified government systems.
Fujitsu Australia launches a PROTECTED Cloud SaaS offering for government in partnership with Vault Systems.
The National Reconstruction Fund makes its first Defence-capability investment to expand SECRET Cloud and hire ~60 staff.
Vault positions to provide sovereign digital infrastructure for Australia's future nuclear-powered submarine fleet.
Founded Vault in 2012; previously eight years as CEO of JN Solutions building government SaaS.
Former Chief Information Officer at the Department of Defence (2012-2017).
Former Commander of Joint Logistics and CEO of Airservices Australia.
Global scaling and operations experience across technology businesses.
20+ years across professional services and technology.
Digital transformation leadership within secure environments.
In December 2024, the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation invested AU$22.5 million in Vault Cloud - the first investment under the AU$10 billion fund's Defence-capability stream, and one of three deals the NRF closed within ten days.
The capital is earmarked to expand existing offerings such as SECRET Cloud, develop new services, increase capacity and hire roughly 60 additional staff, as Vault prepares to underpin sensitive AUKUS-era workloads. Reported total funding stands near US$19.9 million.