Million-dollar data centre for Sydney
Security provider Webroot has chosen Sydney as the site of its first data centre in the southern hemisphere.
The $1 million centre, recently launched in Mascot, marks the beginning of a planned $10 million investment in the Australian and Asia Pacific market over the next two years.
Webroot’s range of Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, including email management and internet content security, will be hosted by the data centre.
Asia Pacific Managing Director Charles Heunemann said employees will include existing Webroot personnel as well as new recruits.
“Saas, particularly for email and web management, is predicted to grow at 44 per cent compound annual growth rate each year – it’s the fastest growing segment of the security software industry,” Heunemann said.
“It provides customers with a way of being able to clean or sanitise their email and their web traffic before it gets to their network, without having to install software or hardware like an anti-spam appliance.
“The (Sydney) data centre delivers that functionality and that service for our regional customers.”
Heunemann said there was little difference in price between SaaS and managed services provision, but the SaaS model provided multi-tenant architecture with greater redundancy.
“Managed services has really hit the limitations of its architecture. In that environment, what you tend to get is companies trying to bend single-tenant systems to serve the needs of their customers.
“SaaS allows us to scale, so that available computing power that isn’t handling spam surges can be dedicated to leverage other areas, such as scanning for malware.”
With server and hardware installation not necessary for the use of SaaS, Heunemann said the model would appeal to resource-tight IT departments in Australia.
“Your typical IT shop will be trying to get more ‘juice for their squeeze’, so they’ll tend to hang on to some of their on-premise infrastructure for perhaps longer than they need to, and the refresh cycles on technology aren’t as rapid as in other jurisdictions,” Heunemann said.
The Sydney data centre, Webroot’s sixth and the first outside the US and Europe, will be followed by further infrastructure in Asian nations, a planned expansion which Heunemann said “confirmed with customers that Webroot is committed to the Asia Pacific region”.
All products and services will be delivered via Webroot’s channel partner base, which currently comprises nine partners, including Clearswift and WebSecure.