Interview: How to sell Google and Microsoft together

CRN: How do your Google customers deal with the fact that their data isn't stored in Australia?

Roberts: We are very open and honest [about where data is stored] and that is the main inhibitor to adoption to BPOS (Buinsess Productivity Online Services) or Google Apps. In my view the first vendor to release an Australian based data centre will clean up in the market.

We have a history of wanting things Australian and that's one of the main reasons that organisations don't make that move.

Cooper: I think it's fair to say that there is certainly a perception that the Patriot Act in the US is an inhibitor for Australian companies to have their data hosted in US data centres.

Google is sensitive to that and will talk to large organisations about how that might be allayed. The only thing they can't do - and no-one can - is host in Australia and that is a major inhibitor to cloud platforms.

Roberts: Google has many data centres that aren't in the US. That's all we can say about that.

I think there is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the Patriot Act because a lot of the countries that do have data centres - and whether they're Microsoft, Google or Salesforce doesn't make a difference - a lot of those countries are signatories to reciprocal agreements with the US.

So although the data is not being held in the US data centre they probably have signed off access rights to US security agencies.

CRN: How good is the security with Google Apps?

Roberts: Taking Google Apps as an example, the data is stored in a way that can't be reconstituted by a local operators.

They might be able to read the bytes but they wouldn't know what that relates to or who it belongs to and it probably wouldn't be a complete email anyway, it would be fragments. It's not to say that a clever guy can't spend a lot of time and money trying to piece things together, but it wouldn't be directly readable by a local operator.

I think the important point is that security is the major cloud vendors' business. If they don't have absolute 100 percent confidence from their clients about their data security, their business model evaporates.