Amazon Web Services mulls Australian data centre

While some customers may be attracted to new Singapore data centre, that lack of a local data centre could cost it business

Amazon has acknowledged it faces a strong challenge in attracting public sector and some private sector customers to its suite of Web Services until it launches an Australia-based data centre.

Speaking to Computerworld Australia Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services and senior vice president said that while the company’s newly launched Singapore data centre would likely appeal to Australian SMEs, attracting government and financial sector customers could be a challenge.

“There is no doubt that there will be some customers who will not use our Web Services until we have a data centre presence in Australia and those customers will wait before they leverage our services,” he said.

“Some of the organisations which might not leverage the Asia Pacific region data centre are those with regulatory requirements that require the data to be in country … the government-, pharmaceuticals- or insurance-side.”

The launch of the Singapore data centre would still attract its share of customers operating in the mobile apps, games, media, website, high performance computing, and start-up space, drawn by the potential for decreased latency, regional data storage and support staff.

“We have a number of Australian customers who have been using Web Services out of our US data centres and there will be a lot of workloads and customers who will find being able to use the resources available in Singapore will be much better,” he said.

“We believe will have a very significant business there and will have along term relationship with business of all sizes here.”

The Singapore data centre will initially offer the core of Amazon’s offers, excluding Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and AWS Import/Export.

“In the case of VPC it is only currently in the United States and we are in the process of rolling it out to Europe and Asia – that will happen in the next few months,” Jassy said. “Import/Export is a capability we build inside our own data centres … we just haven’t built out yet, but we will.”

A date has yet to be determined for the launch of an Australian based Amazon Web Services data centre.

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