NATO taps Accenture and Leonardo to build a €200M secure cloud backbone

NATO wants a cloud it can trust under fire. Its technology agency has signed a contract worth about €200 million with Accenture and Italy’s Leonardo to build one. Accenture announced the deal on Tuesday, struck at the NATO summit in Ankara.

NATO calls the programme the Protected Business Network. It will give the Alliance a single, classified cloud environment where commanders and staff share data and coordinate across every domain. The pitch is resilience: a system built to keep running when attackers try to knock it down.

What the deal covers

Accenture and Leonardo will design, build and run the core platform over seven years, on a multi-cloud setup that NATO’s agency provides. It will reach roughly 29,000 users across the Alliance. The North Atlantic Council has approved it as an Alliance-wide capability.

The plan swaps NATO’s patchwork of legacy systems for a common cloud model and standard engineering. New digital services should then ship faster. Leonardo brings a Zero Trust security design and its own AI multi-agentic platform for cyber defence.

A European backbone

The line-up matters as much as the tech. The work goes to Accenture’s EMEA arm and to Leonardo, an Italian defence group, not to a US contractor. That fits a wider European push to own its defence software and its secure military cloud, rather than lean on American suppliers.

It lands at a pointed moment. Worries over US control of frontier AI have shadowed the Ankara summit, alongside pressure on allies to strip out untrusted kit and rebuild their networks. A homegrown cloud backbone reads as part of that answer.

Why it matters

Defence increasingly looks like a software problem. Speed, secure data and interoperability now shape readiness as much as hardware does. NATO is betting a modern cloud lets it move faster and absorb attacks, with European hands on the controls. Money flows the same way, with fresh funds chasing European defence tech. The build starts now. The real test comes when something tries to break it.