How Open Standards Can Build Cooperative Resilience in the Indo-Pacific

National security is no longer a question of defensive sovereignty; it’s about cooperative resilience. Nations are stronger when they are aligned with their allies, with interoperable technologies that allow for nation-specific security strategies, but also allow for dynamic cooperation when necessary.  

This paradigm shift is a focal point of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s newest report on cybersecurity fragmentation in the Indo-Pacific region, which highlights the very real vulnerabilities that arise from fragmented security practices and policies. The report argues that nations don’t need to be uniform in their security approaches — this would also create risk —  but they should rather work to harmonize their security infrastructures through a latticed approach. 

The Path Forward: Harmony, Not Uniformity 

The ASPI report acknowledges that “any Indo-Pacific harmonisation agenda must contend not only with technical diversity, but with competing models of digital governance.” But this work is crucial: “Without targeted alignment, cyber fragmentation will slow down commerce, hinder innovation and become a lasting drag on regional security and prosperity,” the report warns. 

Virtru is proud to work alongside nations around the globe to support secure interoperability among mission partners, using the TDF open standard. Just as NATO has used TDF to align various partner nations, Indo-Pacific coalition partners can take similar steps to create harmony while maintaining technical diversity and national sovereignty. 

Here’s why that work is so important. 

The Risk: Fragmentation Creates Exploitable Gaps 

Cybersecurity fragmentation doesn’t just make operations more complicated — it increases vulnerability, slows down regional cooperation, raises costs, inhibits innovation, and makes it harder to mount a unified response to cyber threats. Say there’s a major cyber incident affecting multiple coalition partners: Incident response is already challenging when you’re literally speaking different languages, but imagine that your data-sharing technologies are also speaking different languages, without a translator to reconcile them. This obviously slows communication and introduces room for error. 

Fragmented compliance regimes also incentivize organizations to aim for the bare minimum: just enough to satisfy local regulations. What’s needed instead is proactive, risk-based security that addresses threats across borders. When nations take a myopic approach — focusing only on their own rules and frameworks — it results in dangerous security gaps, leaving the region more vulnerable to sophisticated cross-border campaigns from advanced persistent threat actors,  like those we’ve seen from advanced persistent threat actors in China.

Thankfully, there’s a way to balance national sovereignty and strategic data sharing with allied partners.

The Opportunity: Open Standards as Data Security Wrappers

There is a way to balance sovereignty with seamless, secure collaboration: open standards that enforce persistent, data-centric controls.

The Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF), promulgated by NATO’s Combined Communications Electronics Board (CCEB), is a prime example. Built on TDF, ZTDF acts as a data security wrapper: embedding access rights and automatically reconciling classification standards across borders. For example, data tagged as “Top Secret” in the U.S. can be securely translated to its equivalent in the U.K. or Australia — without creating duplicate files or manual reclassification.

This ensures that each nation can continue to:

• Use its own classification criteria
• Maintain control of its own encryption keys
• Enforce attribute-based access controls specific to its environment

…while still enabling dynamic, secure data sharing with allies under the right circumstances, at the right time, with the right individuals or systems.

In this way, open standards create a common language that bridges the gap between nations. Each can manage their own data within their own compliance requirements, with their own data tagging regimes and infrastructure that meets their specific needs. But the use of open standards like TDF allow for dynamic, secure data sharing that keeps sensitive information under the control of the data owner at all times, even after it’s been shared with partners.  

To learn more about how Virtru supports coalition partners with dynamic, data-centric security based on open standards, contact our team today.