James Kavanagh (left), Microsoft Azure Engineering Lead for Australia, and Greg Boorer (right)... [+]
Microsoft has announced that it is going to open two new highly-secure Azure regions in Canberra, Australia to support the needs of the Australian government and its suppliers. The regions will be available in the first half of 2018.
Microsoft is partnering with local datacenter firm Canberra Data Centres (CDC) to supply Azure regions from within datacenters rated to handle Unclassified and Protected classification material. The new regions will make Microsoft the only major cloud provider able to supply this level of secure cloud service to the Australian government.
These new Azure regions, to be called Central 1 and Central 2, join the existing Azure regions in Sydney and Melbourne, providing Azure with a total of four regions in Australia.
"The Australian Government spends between 6.2 billion and 9 billion dollars, based on data from different sources of government, on information and telecommunications technology," said James Kavanagh, Microsoft Azure Engineering Lead for Australia. "It’s quite a large portion of the Australian Government’s budget."
Microsoft chose to partner with a local provider, rather than build its own facilities from scratch. "Microsoft Azure’s revenue is continuing to accelerate and so this expansion is part of a global program," says Kavanagh, "but it’s also a bit of a first from a Microsoft perspective, within that global expansion."
"To try to line up the capabilities that are global of Microsoft with the local strengths of CDC is quite an interesting move that Microsoft is making and it’s a very different kind of approach," he added.
Canberra Data Centres is 48 percent owned by the Australian Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, and 48 percent owned by New Zealand based Infratil. The remaining 4 percent is owned by CDC management.
"Government has been asking me to try and onboard a hyperscale cloud provider for more than three years," said CDC Co-Founder and CEO Greg Boorer. "We have a lot of skin in the game to ensure that the goals of CDC are completely aligned with the goals of government with regards to the positive sovereign outcomes that are delivered out of CDC facilities," he said.
The Australian government has been extolling the virtues of major investments in information technology and 'digital transformation' for some years now, with mixed results. "The Australian Government has embarked on a sweeping program of change, bringing digital innovation to the transformation of the Australian public sector," said the Hon. Angus Taylor MP, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation in a statement. "Global innovation in areas such as cloud technology is an essential foundation for this transformation and will ensure we can meet the expectations and needs of all Australians."
"The challenge of government is really stark," says Boorer. "They have lots and lots of legacy systems that they want to modernise, but they’re sort of restrained by the challenges of the governance, the additional security of government."
The location of cloud resources makes using them a challenge for government, and not just for security reasons: governments have a lot of existing data, and moving it all to the cloud is a significant challenge simply due to physics. Co-locating the cloud systems near existing, secure assets, means cloud services become easier for governments to consume. The Australian federal government is heavily centralized in Canberra, so having access to cloud assets physically nearby overcomes many of the hurdles that clouds even as close as Sydney or Melbourne represent.
The new Azure regions are not limited to government. Ordinary Azure customers can also take advantage of the new regions to provide additional geographic redundancy, or to locate their services closer to government customers.
"We started on a process two years ago to really work with [the Australian Signals Directorate] ASD and our assessors to validate our services," said Microsoft's Kavanagh, "but the isolation mechanisms we were putting in place were effective for that service to handle both unclassified and protected data." Kavanagh also stressed that these new Azure regions are physically and logically isolated from facilities that CDC provides to other entities to house Secret or Top Secret data.
At launch, the new regions will support the same core services that are available in all Azure regions, including Virtual Networks, ExpressRoute, Azure Key Vault, virtual machine infrastructure and the SQLServer platform service. Other services will be added as customer demand warrants.
Microsoft is clearly trying to find ways to differentiate its own cloud services from those of other large providers. "There’s a lot of a mindset, maybe from other Hyperscale Cloud providers or other Cloud providers, that there is one way of doing it and to some extent they’ve stopped listening to the requirement and the asks that are coming from government," says Kavanagh.
"I think what we’re trying to show is that we very much are listening."
