Who owns the sovereign cloud after migration?
Australia’s sovereign cloud is a ten-year commitment to a platform AWS keeps changing. The PROTECTED cloud is live, 168 AWS services now hold IRAP assessment at PROTECTED, and the Top Secret Cloud targets operational readiness in 2027 (Amazon Web Services, 2025b; Data Centre Dynamics, 2024).
Most agencies start with a Cloud Centre of Excellence and a Cloud Business Office. That structure is built for migration. It names no one to decide which services the platform adopts or retires, to answer for its costs, or to check whether consuming teams use what they provisioned. This whitepaper applies the governance argument of Evolve: The Operating Model AI Demands to the sovereign cloud. It sets out who owns each of those decisions under a product operating model, and the order in which to change investment governance, team design and AI before the 2027 target.
Written for SES executives, chief information officers and chief financial officers accountable for cloud investment. This edition replaces Cloud Is Not Infrastructure (May 2026).
