Australia’s IRAP is a security-assessment scheme, not funding — what an IRAP-assessed cloud means when you run AI on sensitive or government data, and how osFoundry can be deployed into one.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.
Australia’s IRAP comes up constantly in conversations about sensitive or government data — and it is widely misunderstood. IRAP is a security-assessment scheme, not a funding program, and knowing what it actually does changes how you deploy AI.
What IRAP actually is
The Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP), run by the Australian Signals Directorate through the ACSC, endorses assessors to independently evaluate ICT systems against the Information Security Manual and the Protective Security Policy Framework. Crucially, an IRAP assessor cannot accredit or authorise a system — the authority-to-operate decision stays with the government entity. And IRAP is unrelated to Canada’s similarly named NRC IRAP, which is a research-funding program.
When IRAP matters for AI
If you handle Australian Government data classified PROTECTED or above, the system generally needs an IRAP assessment, and hosting engages the Hosting Certification Framework (Certified Strategic / Certified Assured) and the Essential Eight. Many private firms in regulated supply chains also ask for IRAP-assessed environments.
Deploying AI into an IRAP-assessed environment
Because osFoundry is self-hostable and model-agnostic, it can be deployed into an Australian cloud region or an IRAP-assessed sovereign cloud (such as those operated by AUCloud or Vault Cloud) running the model you choose. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to the US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer an Australian managed region. For data that must stay in Australia, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside an Australian cloud region such as AWS (Sydney or Melbourne), Microsoft Azure (Australia East, Australia Southeast or Australia Central in Canberra) or Google Cloud (Sydney or Melbourne), or running models locally on-device.
Where dgm fits
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Australian businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.