Just quietly, most Australian data centre operators should raise a glass to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange because those whistleblowers provided some of the last, best reasons for Australian enterprises to keep their data on-shore.
Macquarie Telecom is a homegrown data centre operator and telco that has been leading with governance for a long time, including forming OzHub to lobby the federal government. MacTel never misses a beat to remind businesses of what they risk by sending their data offshore to Google or Microsoft. Macquarie Telecom sales and marketing director Luke Clifton says the message is “resonating even more than before” Snowden blew the whistle.
“We’re 100 percent Australian-owned, and all services end-to-end are Australian-based,” Clifton says.
“We’ll sometimes be attacked by our competition, such as Amazon, about why we keep bringing up what they say are minor issues of security and domiciled data in Australia, accused of being a sales pitch and
it is because it has cut through,” Clifton says. “It resonates and our competitors know that.”
He says customers are specific
and probing in their requests for governance assurances, indicating an engaged and informed market.
“We get asked about the Patriot Act unprompted 50 percent of the time when we’re out on a customer call. We get asked about whether we’re PCI compliant, which we are,
if any of our data is offshored, and we’re asked exactly where our data
centres are.”
And even though customers may be releasing their collective death grip on their closeted racks, they’re not willing to totally ignore the corporeal nature of the hardware to which they entrust their data.
“Even though we know data stored in the cloud could be anywhere, in reality with MacTel it will be in one
of three data centres, and customers want to eyeball the data centre,” says Clifton.
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