Servers Australia: People trust on-premises for data security

With chief executive Jared Hirst

What technology underpins your hybrid cloud or hosting strategy?

We’ve got our own private cloud based on OnApp. We use Nimble for all of our storage, and it’s all based in Equinix. To reach our end customers, we use Equinix Cloud Exchange and Megaport.

When did your company first get involved in this area?

We’ve been doing private cloud for about three years, and we started doing the hybrid stuff around 12 to 18 months ago, when Megaport first launched.

What are your credentials in hybrid cloud and hosting?

We’re ISO9001:2008 certified. We have to control everything and we’re very process-driven. Now, we’re getting an ISO27001 [information security] certification which we’ve nearly finished. All our platforms are PCI compliant as well.

How has public cloud changed the game or influenced your model?

The public cloud changed the way that people think. They all jumped on board, and it was great, but then there were a few outages and people started to think about smaller local providers that do private cloud. We’re not racing to the bottom on public cloud – there’s a space for that, which is Amazon and Azure. We specialise in the private cloud, which those companies don’t.

Heard about any cool developments in the hybrid cloud or hosting space recently?

VMware and Veeam have pretty cool software that allows enterprises to have half of their workloads in their office, and then a portion of their VMware environment in a private cloud. We can bring enterprises into the cloud from their existing on-premises solution really easily.

Can you tell us about a recent hybrid cloud or hosting deployment you have done?

A 100-seat office with their mail and non-sensitive documents in Office 365 connected this to Servers Australia with an Azure Express Route into a private cloud, where documents and SharePoint and other things were synchronised. We provide the compute power for their internal application behind a VPN on a private cloud.

What is driving customers to hybrid cloud or hosting?

What’s driving their decisions is the upload and download speeds between their offices and cloud. The second-highest focus is on data security: people still want to have important files that they don’t trust to the cloud on-premises. And thirdly, some apps might be too old to go to cloud.

Hybrid cloud is…?

We’ve structured our offerings around cloud fabric connects like Megaport and Equinix Cloud Exchange. If these things didn’t exist, there’d be no hybrid cloud at all.