Advancing AUKUS Pillar 2: Leidos Secure Environment Powers the Future of Trilateral Collaboration
Three Points to Remember
- AUKUS Pillar 2 is driving allied innovation across Australia, the UK and the U.S. in key domains such as AI, maritime autonomy, cyber, and hypersonics.
- Leidos has built a digital foundation – the Leidos Secure Environment – for allied collaboration to help AUKUS nations innovate faster, share data safely, and operate with confidence.
- The Leidos Secure Environment is built on AWS Trusted Secure Enclaves, provides a trusted cloud platform for secure, compliant, and sovereign collaboration.
Picture a trilateral working group convening virtually across time zones—an Australian quantum researcher, a British AI policy lead, and a U.S. defense technologist collaborating on simulation data and sensitive design models. It’s not a classified environment, yet security is non-negotiable. Their collaboration must be seamless, sovereign, and safe.
This is not a distant scenario, it’s the emerging reality of AUKUS Pillar 2, the trilateral partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to develop and deploy advanced capabilities across domains like maritime autonomy, artificial intelligence, cyber, and hypersonics.
AUKUS Pillar 2 is not just about military hardware. It’s about creating an agile, trusted framework for innovation that accelerates collaboration across partner governments, industry, academia, and civil institutions. For that framework to function, information must move freely, securely, and compliantly across borders and organizations.
That’s where the Leidos Secure Environment comes in, a secure, cloud-native platform and suite of services designed to support real-time, multi-national collaboration at scale, built entirely in the commercial cloud.
“The platform gives allied partners a secure capability that supports faster collaboration, not just across defense departments, but across entire sectors,” said Berg Atkinson, senior solutions architect at Leidos. “We’ve created an environment where sovereignty, speed, and security can coexist.”
Reimagining collaboration in the cloud
Traditional models of secure collaboration, like sovereign-only clouds or closed, classified networks, weren’t designed for the type of open, cross-sector engagement AUKUS now demands. These systems, while essential for warfighting, are too rigid and siloed for the broader innovation effort needed in Pillar 2.
The Leidos Secure Environment changes that equation. Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trusted Secure Enclaves (TSE), Leidos has created a secure-on-commercial solution that is designed to bring the full power of AWS’s commercial cloud to sensitive international collaboration. Nations can retain sovereign control over their environments and data while operating within a common, export-compliant framework.
This isn't just a secure workspace. It’s an automated, hyper-scalable platform where access is governed by attributes such as nationality and role, supporting precise, dynamic, and policy-aligned collaboration across national boundaries.
We designed the platform to meet the operational realities of today’s alliance-driven missions. It’s more than a product—it’s a purpose-built solution that reflects our deep understanding of what secure, multi-national collaboration truly requires.
Kevin Fogarty
SVP and CTO, Commercial and International
Infrastructure you don’t see — until you need it
Just like roads or power grids, digital infrastructure tends to go unnoticed until it fails. But as AUKUS partners move faster on policy development, supply chain coordination, and advanced technology prototyping, a stable and secure digital foundation becomes essential.
The Leidos Secure Environment delivers that foundation. Built for speed and flexibility, it allows highly secure environments to be set up quickly in any AWS commercial region. Automation makes deployment easier and reduces mistakes, while its connected design lets each partner nation stay independent yet work together effectively.
“When you’re connecting partners across different countries, sectors, and compliance regimes, automation becomes a necessity—not a luxury,” said Atkinson. “Manual processes do not meet the pace needed for effective AUKUS collaboration.”
Built for the mission, proven in practice
Leidos isn’t just offering the Leidos Secure Environment to customers, it’s using the platform internally to handle export-controlled information and evaluate real-world scenarios. This firsthand experience continues to shape the Leidos Secure Environment’s evolution and readiness for mission-critical use cases.
This platform also represents a shift in mindset. It challenges the notion that secure collaboration must be confined to sovereign-only or classified environments. Instead, the Leidos Secure Environment proves that with the right architecture and controls, secure-on-commercial is not only possible, it’s preferable for multi-national, multi-sector engagement.
“This isn’t about lifting and shifting legacy systems,” said Fogarty. “This is about designing from the ground up for secure, federated collaboration—one that respects sovereignty while enabling speed.”
Powering the future of allied innovation
With the Leidos Secure Environment, the foundation for AUKUS Pillar 2, and its long-term commitment to shared innovation, is already in place. Leidos recently achieved AWS TSE Vetted Partner Program (VPP) status, affirming the company’s position as a leader in the development and deployment of highly secure-on-commercial environments. This milestone underscores Leidos’ ability to provide AUKUS partners with the highest levels of security, expertise, and trust, precisely what's required to support sensitive, mission-critical collaboration at a global scale.
Leidos has a demonstrated history of delivering mission-critical outcomes for its customers. With the Leidos Secure Environment, the next evolution of digital infrastructure is ready to move the mission forward.
