NATO to Create Cloud-Based Service to Share Experience with Ukraine

NATO will create a cloud-based service to share combat data with Ukraine, but does not yet have procedures for its secure use.

This was reported by Defense One.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has yielded huge amounts of combat data, but Kyiv still does not have an effective way to share it with NATO partners. The Alliance plans to fix this next year.

“Ukraine has a lot of data that it wants to share with NATO as part of a joint training center in Poland. We are creating a cloud-based solution for this purpose, which will be able to process large amounts of data from the Ukrainian battlefield. And we hope that it will be operational on NATO’s cloud infrastructure in January 2026,” said NATO’s assistant secretary general for operations Thomas Goffus.

According to him, all the necessary equipment has already been purchased, but there is no approved accreditation policy for such a system. The question is how to officially authorize its use and guarantee its safety.

“All of our tools are designed for network-centered security, but we are striving to move to cloud-centered security. And this is one of the biggest challenges,” Goffus said.

To solve this problem, NATO plans to adopt the experience of large American cloud providers that already work with secret national clouds for the security sector.

Goffus emphasized that the new system should be created from scratch to avoid the limitations of existing networks. Although the plan envisages the use of commercial technologies with an open architecture that ensures compatibility of equipment from different manufacturers, the final owner should be the state.

“It should be a completely new system – not a federation of systems. And despite the use of commercial solutions, it must be defined and owned by the state. We should be the gatekeepers of this process,” he emphasized.

The increasing amount of data generated by the modern battlefield – from fighter jets to drones – increases the need for rapid access, analysis and sharing of information. NATO’s vision is to integrate data from partner nations and create a centralized cloud solution.

“NATO needs a cloud-based system with an open architecture that integrates data from national sensor systems. Countries purchase sensors that collect data, and NATO integrates them and ensures that the information is complete,” Goffus explained.

Thus, the accreditation and implementation of data exchange procedures with Ukraine can open a new stage of cooperation and accelerate information exchange throughout the Alliance.

In late November, Ukraine and NATO launched the first joint program to accelerate the implementation of defense innovations – UNITE – Brave NATO.