Winners are grinners at Microsoft Australia, after the company won certification of its services as “secure” by the Australian Signals Directorate.

Certification ensures wider use of its products by government departments and agencies. Most rival Amazon Web Services products are believed to be yet to gain similar certification, according to an Australian Financial Review report.

Microsoft is currently the only hyper-scale cloud provider able to offer certified machine learning, Internet-of-Things analytics and advanced threat protection services to government via the cloud, according to national technology officer James Kavanagh.