Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA) has completed an extensive IT and security overhaul as part of a transformation to become a 'fully fledged' Australian sovereign subsidiary of Elbit Systems Ltd.
"The transformation was aimed at making ELSA a more Australian subsidiary," ELSA Managing Director, Major General (ret’d) Paul McLachlan, said. "It outlined a complex security and governance upgrade, and a significant IT process and hardware upgrade that saw ELSA establish and sustain a secure software factory that allowed safe and secure transfer and development of cutting-edge software.
"This software could then be gifted over a firewall to where Australian-only feature points, architecture revisions, or integration requirements could be developed by Australian engineers as required."
ELSA yesterday commissioned the final piece of the hardware upgrade at its facility in Port Melbourne, Victoria.
"Our forces need a fully integrated system that offers warfighters an edge in combat," McLachlan said. "Our E6 BMS has the capacity to fuse information from all levels of sensors from the land, air, maritime and space domains. It can allocate and define targets. It can assign traditional units or autonomous platforms, and it can assign joint effects all the way through the non-lethal to lethal as circumstances require."
The transformation towards becoming a more sovereign Australian subsidiary began in 2020, and was taken in partnership with Accenture in response to what McLachlan called a "gradual, but significant shift in the Commonwealth’s policy regarding the involvement of non-Five Eyes companies working across defence industry."
“Accenture Australia partnered with ELSA in 2020 to support the design, development and implementation of IT infrastructure to augment our existing capacity to produce secure and trusted sovereign products, aligning global baseline production methods with the requirements of our Australian customers," McLachlan said.
“The transformation of our Australian business across governance, physical, cyber and personnel – including the recent appointment of Australian Dr. Karen Stanton as Chair of ELSA’s board of directors and our new board security committee and appointments, meet and exceed the requirements for a high level of Defence Industry Security Program.”