Cloud provider Rackspace has revealed plans to open an Australian data centre within 18 months, in response to the nation’s data protection requirements and customer demand. Rackspace offers storage-, server- and platform-as-a-service to some 2500 companies in Australia and New Zealand, including Rio Tinto and Xero. Australian Rackspace hosting customers are today served out of its Hong Kong data centre.

Chief operating officer Mark Roenigk said Australian privacy legislation and Rackspace’s lack of an on-shore data centre has skewed its hosting business towards web hosting rather than ‘e-tailing’. “In some industries there’s data protection requirements by the government there, and some or a lot of that data needs to stay right within Australia,” said Roenigk.  “So the usiness we’re doing with Australian customers today are typically things that can be outsourced that sits outside the proprietary information governance there in Australia.”

Source: IT News