Leading Edge Data Centres launches regional cloud services

Australian regional data centre operator Leading Edge Data Centres (LEDC) has announced the launch of new cloud services, providing public and private cloud access within all of their locations.

Partnering with Australian headquartered global cloud provider RackCorp, the offering will provide local cloud access for customers across regional Australia, leveraging RackCorp’s cloud infrastructure services.

The two initial product suites being offered are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which delivers virtual servers, dedicated servers and dedicated cloud, and storage solutions, which provide Backup as a Service (BUaaS) and S3 Cloud Storage.

LEDC says it is the first direct cloud access solution provided to regional Australians and that the new products will allow LEDC customers to partake in the A$1.89 billion cloud market.

As LEDC has deployed their data centres and network, regional customers have been adopting traditional data centre services, yet are still accessing clouds located in metro-based data centres.

This local cloud access will improve the latency, connectivity and data sovereignty issues arising from accessing metro-based clouds.

The products will initially be offered within Leading Edge’s data centres in Newcastle and Dubbo, with plans to extend the deployment to Albury in first half 2023, servicing the Hunter, Central West and Murray Regions of NSW.

LEDC's new product offerings target managed service providers to white label or deploy their own cloud infrastructure and system integrators to provide a separate cloud platform to offer a redundant cloud solution.

Customers are able to build customised local, private or hybrid cloud solutions to support their business.

LEDC chief executive officer and founder Chris Thorpe said that using RackCorp as the backbone for its cloud service offering will accelerate the digital transformation for regional Australia.

“Our partnership with RackCorp introduces increased choice to our customers on how they want to deploy their IT infrastructure," Thorpe said.

The positive feedback from our customer pilot immediately validated the benefits of our new product offerings,” he added.

Our partnership with Leading Edge Data Centres is a great opportunity to provide secure public and private cloud services in rapidly growing Australian regional centres," RackCorp’s chief executive Lawrence Michael said.

In May last year, LEDC secured a $30 million equity investment in its regional edge network from an affiliate of US-based DigitalBridge Group for the expansion of its edge data centre network.

LEDC appointed Seán O’Halloran as chief commercial officer in February 2022.

In April 2021, the company secured land across regional Victoria with plans to build a network of Tier III data centres across the state.

During August 2020, LEDC started construction on its new facility in Mayfield West in Newcastle, NSW, the first of eight planned for the state.

In May 2020, LEDC secured a $20 million investment to help fund its plans to build new regional data centres, and partnered with Cisco in December 2020 to construct and deploy them.