Melbourne has long been known as Sydney’s cloudier cousin—though more so for its inclement weather than for its cloud infrastructure.
While it is home to the headquarters of many major corporations, the reality is that many held back from investing fully in digital transformation and the cloud. One primary reason for this was a lack of close proximity access to hyperscalers like Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure, who had yet to deploy regions in the city.
Yet with recent and oncoming deployments from these providers, Melbourne is now becoming a cloud hub in its own right. It is also fast becoming an important recovery/business continuity option for businesses whose primary cloud access point is elsewhere.
Google is the most recent hyperscaler to launch a cloud region in Melbourne. Google joins Microsoft and Oracle, who have already established themselves here, providing significant growth in cloud choice and making the city the next natural enterprise base.
The new home of Google Cloud Interconnect (GCI) in Melbourne is Equinix’s ME1/ME2 facility. Connectivity via Equinix Fabric™ will allow Google Cloud Platform customers to set up dedicated connectivity to the GCI edge in both Sydney and Melbourne for redundant Google Cloud Platform deployments. The launch includes both Zone 1 and Zone 2 connectivity for high availability within the Melbourne region.
Melbourne-based enterprises who use these cloud computing services can now have them hosted and run locally, rather than from Sydney or further afield. This allows those organisations to benefit from direct cloud adjacency, experiencing the ability to interconnect securely, while lowering cost and improving performance through direct access to critical data resources.
Equinix Fabric™
Equinix Fabric directly, securely and dynamically connects distributed infrastructure and digital ecosystems on Platform Equinix®. Establish data centre-to-data centre network connections on demand between any two Equinix Fabric locations within a metro or globally via software-defined interconnection.
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Hybrid Multicloud Benefits Realised
Melbourne’s new status is particularly exciting for a growing number of businesses which are looking towards developing a hybrid and/or multicloud strategy—one that maximises their returns from cloud while minimising risks.
In Australia, IT services revenue has been forecast to grow from $20 billion in 2019 to $24 billion by 2023, thanks to security and the growth of hybrid cloud specifically.[1] Research from analyst firm IDC states that digital transformation initiatives are driving increased hybrid and multicloud deployments to support next generation workloads.
As the new clouds roll in over Melbourne, Equinix’s platform makes it far easier to unlock the benefits of the cloud without having to connect via public internet or having to establish a new contract agreement with a provider.
Removing Roadblocks
With security the biggest roadblock to public cloud adoption—80% of those surveyed in Australia indicating this to be the case even before the uptick in cyberattacks during the coronavirus pandemic[2]—the private, secure connections that ME2 International Business ExchangeTM (IBX®) provides is also increasingly in demand.
Already Platform Equinix® has the highest share of the world’s public cloud on-ramps and is the most connected data centre ecosystem, with the potential to pick and choose from more than 2,900 cloud and technology services to add and integrate new components into your IT environment. Within data centres like Melbourne’s new ME2 facility, which opened earlier this year, customers can connect in our data centres and go anywhere in the world, enjoying seamless connectivity as they create network and data hubs on demand.
Digital Strategy of the Future Possible with Cloud Choice
With multiple clouds to choose from, whether Google, Microsoft, AWS or Oracle, an organisation can tap into multiple public cloud services from different providers to achieve best-of-breed results. They may run all compute and networking activities in AWS while using database services from Azure, for example—in other words, keeping their cloud usage task-specific. At the same time, this flexibility also enables them to reduce vendor lock-in.
This enables greater agility, as organisations find they can tap into multiple clouds and evolve their digital strategy without making any adjustments to their architecture.
This flexibility and choice was something that Equinix customer ServCorp, an Australian-based multinational organisation that sells serviced office space, virtual office products and IT services, highlighted as one of the key benefits of joining Platform Equinix. At the same time, ServCorp saved on cost related to infrastructure requirements while positioning itself for Asia-Pacific expansion.
So yes, the clouds are gathering over Melbourne—but with the best possible hybrid architecture and customer experience now all accessible, every cloud has a silver lining.
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