The Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) and Google Cloud will be piloting the use of Google Distributed Cloud Hosted (GDC Hosted) to support CSIT’s effort to harness AI in tackling Singapore’s defence and security challenges.
CSIT, a member of the Defence Technology Community, has been working with Google Cloud by providing its use cases and technical requirements to further enhance GDC Hosted.
As part of the pilot, CSIT will trial the use of GDC Hosted on-premises, tapping on the solution’s built-in data management and pre-trained machine learning capabilities to process sensitive data.
GDC Hosted provides organisations in the public sector and highly regulated industries with a cloud platform that requires no connectivity to Google Cloud or the public internet for its operation and continued management.
This gives organisations the ability to run workloads in their data centres with the functionality, flexibility, and scale of cloud services.
This also includes the ability to form clusters across multiple GDC Hosted zones for added protection against system failures, and more flexible, modular options for adding extra compute resources like the graphics processing units (GPUs) designed for running demanding AI workloads.
Updates to GDC Hosted, including Google Cloud’s pre-trained AI models, are accessed through secure hardware and installed by the customer itself.
As a user of GDC Hosted, CSIT retains total operational control over all data and software, ensuring the safety and security of mission-critical workloads.
Built using industry-leading open source components like Kubernetes, GDC Hosted also provides access to familiar developer tools, enabling CSIT’s technical personnel to operate GDC Hosted and its applications with minimal retraining.
“The collaboration with Google Cloud on GDC Hosted allows us to tap on its expertise in data management, cloud technologies, and AI while keeping sensitive data secure,” said Darren Teo, chief executive of CSIT.
Mitesh Agarwal, managing director of technology and solutions at Google Cloud Asia Pacific, said that by offering full isolation alongside integrated AI services and access to an open ecosystem, GDC Hosted combines the benefits of fully managed and scalable infrastructure for running mission-critical workloads with operational flexibility.
