Thales and Microsoft are creating a preferred partnership for the development of a common Defence Cloud solution for the armed forces.

The solution is based on the Microsoft Azure Stack platform, a services-oriented and flexible hybrid cloud environment that will be fully cyber-secured and adapted to military resilience constraints by Thales.

This modular solution will allow armed forces to keep their sensitive data inside their own infrastructures.

The two groups say their partnership will become the first to offer a complementary solution adapted to the differing needs of armed forces — from national command centres down to individual theatres of operations, with no compromise on security.

The system will handle the most sensitive data, whilst keeping it hosted at MoD headquarters or deployed in the field.

The two partners say their flexible cloud application platform goes far beyond the basic functionalities of data storage and management, which secured defence clouds do not currently possess.

Earlier, Thales had announced its Nexium Defence Cloud private cloud infrastructure solution for the armed forces.