Google appears to have the inside track on a pilot cloud computing contract with the Australian Department of Defence, giving it an important victory in the race among cloud service providers to tap into public sector spending worldwide.

Responding to a legislator’s request for clarifications that ZDNet picked up on Thursday, the ministry revealed that it has embarked upon a two-year trial run of an online learning environment for the Australian Defence College on Google Apps. The document contained few other details about the project, except to say than the platform won’t contain any classified data that could potentially become vulnerable outside internal facilities.

But it did reveal that the pilot is  part of a wider effort by the ministry to identify potential applications for cloud computing, which mirrors a cross-department initiative that Federal agencies stateside have been pursuing in recent years on the urging of the White House. The U.S. alone allocated some $3 billion to off-premise infrastructure and services in 2014, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a formidable sum that’s nevertheless only a fraction of worldwide public sector spending.

Google is eager to mine public-sector business, but so are its competitors. Microsoft recently launched an isolated section of its infrastructure-as-a-service platform geared toward the requirements of U.S. agencies, while Amazon has been operating a similar government-centric environment for nearly four years.

Amazon turned heads when it won a $600 million deal in 2013 to construct a dedicated facility for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a victory that the head of its public sector business told SiliconANGLE triggered an outpour of demand from other Federal departments. But Google has managed to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with in the public sector with its online productivity tools.

The deal with the Australian Department of Defence reinforces that position, especially given that the search giant’s nearest data center is located in Singapore – a foreign jurisdiction. The fact that the ministry is still centering the pilot on its platform despite the abundance of competitors with local facilities is a major vote of confidence in Google Apps.

And as the number of regional customers increases, so does the motivation for the company to open a data center Down Under. It would be playing catch-up with Microsoft and Amazon, both of which already have facilities in Australia.

image courtesy of usingtechnologybetter.com