By Simon Cooper, Chief Operations Officer
I’m often asked the question regarding our data centre locations, and why we ultimately build where we build. The short answer is that every strategic decision we make is calculated to result in outstanding outcomes for our customers.
A longer explanation focuses on how we intimately research and understand the markets we operate in and make decisions about where demand is going to come from two, three or even five years into the future.
Based on the events of 2020, the dependence of every individual and organisation on digital platforms and interconnectivity has accelerated dramatically. Subsequently, the volume of data being captured, shared, migrated, and stored continues to grow at an extraordinary rate.
So, it comes as no surprise that public cloud leaders such as AWS, Google and Oracle continue to expand their capacity and light up new cloud availability zones where there’s growing demand; which ultimately results in the need to improve application performance and customer experience.
Planning for digital growth
Building geo-diversity around cloud availability is an important component of our company’s vision and purpose. After all, the role we play for our customers is to design, engineer and operate the critical digital infrastructure that supports their ability to digitally transform and thrive in the information economy.
Knowing where to build infrastructure that will accurately match the present and future digitisation demands of customers is a crucial area of value, which we see as being a core responsibility of ours.
As business, Government and communities continue to generate extraordinary and ever-increasing amounts of data, the role of digital infrastructure that manages it becomes ever more crucial to economic development.
Organisations continue to seek cost, performance and productivity value through digital transformation, a journey that is vastly improved and simplified when they are able to get as close as possible to cloud Availability Zones (AZ).
New territories, greater opportunities
Melbourne has been the target of growth as far as deployment of new cloud infrastructure is concerned. AWS are the latest to announce they are launching a new region there, behind Google and Oracle. And that’s just this year.
Melbourne’s demand for digital infrastructure has grown rapidly in recent years in line with Victoria’s booming economy. As Victorian organisations accelerate their digital strategies to meet new challenges and stay relevant in the new world, they continue to diversify and explore new ways of leveraging cloud.
Anticipating the growth we forecast was coming, we expanded our Melbourne footprint with the delivery of M2, Victoria’s only Tier IV certified, fault tolerant facility that is enabling our customers to seamlessly grow their critical infrastructure in region, without having to re-invent their Hybrid Cloud (and Multi-Cloud) architectures.
The unconstrained growth we are seeing in Melbourne is being enabled by M2, and hyperscale customers are rapidly deploying and expanding their infrastructure to accommodate the next wave of cloud and digitisation. Supporting the need for connectivity to clouds has acted as an accelerant for our staged expansion plans at M2.
For the moment, Sydney remains the digital heartbeat of Australia and with our new S3 development now under construction, we are readily gearing up for the future demand we know is coming in this region.
Helping customers get more out of cloud
However, as cloud availability regions continue to expand in Melbourne, Victorian businesses have unprecedented opportunity to accelerate innovation, productivity and risk mitigation agendas. These benefits are compounded when physical and virtual infrastructure are within the closest possible proximity to each other.
NEXTDC continues to expand our footprint in alignment with known and expected future cloud demand, so our customers are free to grow without friction. We facilitate the underlying capability to scale in a flexible, and agile manner by providing immediate access to capacity, clouds and local availability zones all of which underpin the success of today’s digital businesses. And we enable them to interconnect their services locally, and natively helping our customers achieve best possible outcomes.
The key to extracting full value from cloud in terms of cost, performance and risk is to be as close as possible to the infrastructure where the clouds live. Benefits from this proximity are best achieved by connecting locally and natively, something that NEXTDC provides as Australia’s most cloud connected digital infrastructure platform.
This is where over 640 cloud platforms, carriers, managed as-a-Service providers and IT solutions specialists form a virtual technology hub that is driving innovation and digitisation of the Australian economy.
The impact of jitter and latency is real, and it is the difference between a poor experience and a great one. This is where proximity plays a pivotal role. NEXTDC provides our customers with the ability to interconnect to the services their business needs to succeed, delivering the highest performance, and an exceptional experience every time, from anywhere.
For the moment, Sydney remains the digital heartbeat of Australia and with our new S3 development now under construction, we are readily gearing up for the future demand we know is coming in this region.
A new cloudy outlook
In Melbourne, the clouds continue rolling in, and not the dark ones you’d expect. Instead, these are the next generation of digital infrastructure that will facilitate the digital growth that will spark the next wave of economic development in Australia.
Our focus revolves around partnering with our customers to ensure their business is underpinned by secure, resilient infrastructure their business needs to succeed. If achieving this is something we can help you with, reach out to our team.
