Symantec opens second Australian data centre

Symantec has agreed to place servers underpinning its cloud-based security services into a second Australian data centre.

The firm signed a three-year, "multi-million dollar" co-location deal with Fujitsu Australia, adding to its existing presence in Equinix Sydney and 17 other facilities worldwide.

Symantec.cloud Asia Pacific and Japan vice president Brenton Smith told iTnews that the decision was about adding local capacity and failover capability as it took on large customers.

"Throughout the year just been, we've added a 50,000-user customer and we're currently buying for another 40,000-user customer," Smith said.

"In anticipation of next year's uptake, we needed an additional data centre facility for the capacity but also to offer failover situations. That's not something we've had locally up until now.

"With so many bigger customers on board ... if a big issue happens we're in better shape."

The Fujitsu data centre will primarily host web scanning products Symantec acquired from MessageLabs.

The companies did not disclose the amount of floor or rack space that Symantec has leased.

The move did not appear to be related to data sovereignty, a key factor in determining whether a cloud service can win government or financial sector business in Australia.

Smith said that even with two Australian data centres, the configuration of Symantec.cloud meant Symantec could not guarantee that any part of a customer workload wasn't processed outside of Australian borders.

"To make that happen we'd have to set up another data centre specifically only tied to Australian customers," he said.