BAE Systems and Microsoft have announced a "strategic agreement" they say aims "to support faster and easier development, deployment and management of digital defence capabilities".
"As well as helping partners collaborate on large multinational defence projects, such as the future combat air system, cloud technology could be used to more easily combine and analyse different sources of data during military operations," the companies said in a statement, explaining that as part of this collaboration, they "have used the Azure Cloud approach to accelerate software design, development and testing of a system that can deploy new software on to an uncrewed air vehicle during flight".
"This approach to using the cloud could in future speed up the deployment of software to operational military platforms. Modern fighter jets, for example, can require up to 24 million lines of code to function effectively, so using the cloud to deploy updates could make the process quicker and help retain a competitive advantage over adversaries," they claimed.
“The data available to the defence sector and armed forces is often highly complex and comes from hundreds of thousands of sources, whether that’s satellite and radar feeds, intelligence gathered by ships at sea or even social media," said Julian Cracknell, chief technology and information officer at BAE Systems.
“This strategic agreement will enable defence organisations to use data more effectively. This will help them promote stability and security for residents, nations and multinational alliances,” said Clare Barclay, chief executive of Microsoft UK.