Google Public Sector said today that its Google Distributed Cloud Hosted (GDC Hosted) service has received authorizations to host some of the most sensitive missions for the Defense Department (DoD) and U.S. intelligence community agencies.
The authorizations mean that GDC Hosted can host Top Secret missions for DoD, and both Secret and Top Secret missions for intelligence agencies, according to a blog post by Leigh Palmer, Google Public Sector’s vice president of delivery and operations.
Google Public Sector announced the new authorizations at its Google Cloud Next event being held today in Las Vegas.
“This authorization underscores Google Public Sector’s commitment to empowering government agencies with secure, cutting-edge technology,” the organization said.
Examples of Top Secret and Secret-level data include government personnel records, information about pending cyber threats, geospatial data, and language translation in support of humanitarian efforts, Google Public Sector said.
The company explained that GDC Hosted is an “air-gapped cloud solution built specifically for stringent security requirements, allowing U.S. intelligence and DoD agencies to host, control, and manage their infrastructure and services in a highly secure environment, while leveraging the power of advanced cloud capabilities like data analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI).”
Because GDC Hosted is air-gapped, it “does not require connectivity to Google Cloud or the public internet to manage the infrastructure, services, APIs, or tooling, and is built to remain disconnected in perpetuity,” the company said, adding that “GDC Hosted is designed to support strict requirements in alignment with NIST SP 800-53-FedRAMP high security controls.”
