UK headquartered Assured Digital Group (“ADG”) today announced it had received investment from high-profile Australian investors to support global expansion of digital services for sovereign nations and industries to operate in a secure and assured manner.
Founding CEO of ADG, serial entrepreneur Phil Dawson, stated that the investment was a significant step forward for both ADG and digital industries exporting UK innovation to nations valuing national security and information assurance.
Dawson previously co-founded the fastest growing tech company in the UK, Skyscape Cloud Services (now named UKcloud), which is the clear market leading provider of government cloud services and ADG subsidiary, MDS Technologies (also on the fastest growing UK Tech company list), placing him at the forefront of understanding the opportunities that digital disruption creates for societal benefit.
“We are delighted to have Cathie’s exceptional talent and experience join our Board not only to support our strategic growth planning but also to help nurture the talent development of the young women and men within our Group. During the UKcloud journey where we developed the leading classified cloud platform for UK Government, a number of other friendly nations and industries built case studies around our work. This current investment from Australian investors and partners will allow ADG to establish a similar community cloud platform for Australian Government that supports equivalent characteristics and unique needs of a sovereign nation rather than the one size fits all Made-in-America model.”
The investment from healthcare entrepreneurs Cathie Reid and Stuart Giles, founders of Australia’s largest cancer services provider Icon Group (now also rapidly expanding into Asia) and Epic Pharmacies, recently named in the Australian Financial Review as one of the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies for their development of digital health tools.
Cathie was inducted into the Australian Businesswomen’s Hall of Fame in 2015, named one of the Top 100 Women of Influence by the Australian Financial Review in 2013, won a National Telstra Business Women’s Award in 2011, and recognised by Monash University with a Distinguished Alumni Award for Professional Achievement in 2012.
On her recent appointment as a Director of ADG Cathie noted: “on meeting the ADG founders and team, we recognized the opportunity to invest in like-minded people who are driven to make change with a purpose of greater value for citizens and secure operation of government and healthcare. ADG has an incredible opportunity to effect change and we look forward to contributing to the growth journey.”
Following the global financial crisis, the UK Government led the world with digital and procurement policies and processes to effect transformation, which initiated the growth of companies like UKcloud that were expressly developed to support the UK’s sovereign needs.
CEO of ADG AsiaPac Scott Wilkie stated: “the Australian Government were one of the first to take note of the UK’s successful transformation and openly copy policy and design with development of the Digital Transformation Office, which Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull duly credited to Francis Maude and the GDS team. There is no UKcloud equivalent in Australia, specifically designed to support Australia’s growing requirement to collaborate securely at multiple classification levels. We intend to take the best of British learnings and apply some world leading Australian IP to create an assured cloud IaaS platform built for 2020 and beyond – highly secure and built for large data sets which require highly performant compute supporting analysis from multiple trusted collaborating parties. Although senior officials from other friendly nations are calling to express interest, we are completely focused on Australia at this stage.”
Dawson noted the similarities of the genomics and precision medicine industries which like government highly value data security, privacy, integrity and availability. “Some of the biggest and smartest companies in the world are involved in the UK’s 100,000 Genomes Project and recognize they are on the footsteps of a trillion$ industry – it is only natural that they chose to work with UKcloud and ADG to develop a secure mechanism for growth of this industry while protecting the privacy of the most integral thing to each patient – his or her genetic makeup. This is not data that governments or assured industries want stored in unknown jurisdictions or those that defer individual rights to those of the state.”
ADG has established a separate entity for the Australian cloud platform and expects to make further announcements in the near future.
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