blog It looks like those hoping Microsoft will build an Australian datacentre to host Windows Azure applications or Office 365 services might be hoping in vain. Yesterday, the software behemoth’s Australian chief technology officer Greg Stone reportedly told CIO Magazine (click here for the full article) that such a move just wasn’t possible. Stone said:
“We’re not at the point now where the business can sustain us making a significant investment in Australia to put something like a public cloud of that nature here because it doesn’t make any economic sense, particularly if we want to deliver it at the price point comparative.”
Our only question for Microsoft is … if Salesforce.com, Amazon, Oracle, Fujitsu, CSC, Telstra, Optus, HP, Dell and more can establish cloud computing facilities in Australia, and even startups like Ninefold can afford to do so, what’s stopping Microsoft? Is there something special about Microsoft that makes it different from other companies? Or is the company’s reluctance to build a cloud computing facility in Australia simply because it hasn’t examined the case closely enough?
Image credit: Amit Chattopadhyay, Creative Commons
The question I would ask is, what specific problem does building a data centre in Australia solve? As we’ve already seen, things like data sovereignty don’t really count, since Microsoft is a U.S. based company and the Patriot Act still applies to any data centre it would build in Australia.
If it’s an issue of latency or performance, then it might make sense, though I’ve never had an issue with latency to any of Microsoft’s services. A CDN-style node might make sense (similar to what Google has), if they don’t have one already, but I just don’t think a full-blown data centre is going to solve any actual problems…
“things like data sovereignty don’t really count”
Yeah? Tell that to the public and financial services sectors.
Just one example:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/261689,westpac-shifts-50000-inboxes-to-microsoft.aspx
Quoting Westpac CIO Bob McKinnon:
“We had a major restriction,” he noted. “We could have bought from Microsoft who had a hosted service out of Singapore, but from a data sovereignty point of view, financial services providers can’t allow data to be offshore. You wouldn’t be surprised to know a lot of important data is held on email.”
Well, for certain customers, perhaps. But that’s a subset of the Australian market, which is only a subset of the worldwide market. Overall, it’s a tiny percentage of customers, and building a whole datacentre just for them seems like serious overkill.
There are plenty of Australian companies who are still willing to go with cloud-based email despite the data sovereignty issue, so I just think the benefit there doesn’t justify the cost.
Actually I don’t think it’s a small subset of customers at all — if you think about the fact that the financial services and government sectors are some of the largest consumers of IT in Australia, it’s actually huge.
Hmmm, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree then :-)
Westpac is an Australian company, not an American one. What Dean Harding was talking about (American companies hosting data on Australia servers).
So in regards to Microsoft, he is correct. In terms of privacy issue, most of the IT companies happen to be American based.
Westpac is an Australian company, not an American one. What Dean Harding was talking about (American companies hosting data on Australia servers).
So in regards to Microsoft, he is correct. In terms of privacy issue, most of the IT companies happen to be American based.
There’s already a MS/Azure CDN POP in Sydney.
I’d say costs are too high, and MS don’t want to pass the costs on. The cloud providers you listed are all pretty expensive.
Microsoft has never been a company known for being inexpensive ;)
So, they charge significantly more but don’t provide local servers? Idiots..
But they most definitely do have cloud services here, of such is a Live@Edu system being setup right now for DECS (In SA), as they wouldnt sign a contract for Live@Edu state wide unless the data was hosted in Australia…..
But, they are held within the Telstra Walls, But Managed by Microsoft (Currently in Build and not yet complete)
That’s interesting – the universities which have gone to live@edu say that their student (and sometimes staff) email is hosted in Singapore, HK or Japan. The only documentation i found on this was http://www.decs.sa.gov.au/mediacentre/files/links/CE_Circ_11_021_New_School.pdf – which didn’t commit Microsoft to having the data stored in Australia (and as we know doesn’t really matter matter if the data is physically in Australia or not). In fact their circular doesn’t even raise international data location as a concern. Obviously something has changed…
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