Macquarie Telecom completes Canberra datacentre expansion

Macquarie Government, Macquarie Telecom's government cybersecurity and cloud arm, has announced the completion of its Intellicentre 4 expansion in Canberra.

The 50 percent expansion included new secure data halls, greater resiliency and backup power, and 24/7 power and plant systems monitoring, with the datacentre "bunker" connected directly to the ICON fibre network in Canberra.

The Intellicentre 4 enables government agencies to comply with the Australian government's "cloud first" policy -- especially as security becomes the highest priority following the Census debacle last year.

"Our Canberra datacentre is purpose-built to meet the security needs of federal government customers, providing them a secure government to host data and deploy cloud services. The government's need for security has never been higher, as was highlighted in review of the eCensus failure last year," Macquarie Government managing director Aidan Tudehope said.

"The right cloud solution can be much more secure than legacy government systems ... Macquarie Telecom has made a deliberate decision to keep our datacentres on Australian soil to keep all sensitive data within the country and completely under the Australian jurisdiction."

Macquarie Telecom in May last year announced that it would be spending an additional AU$15 million on equipment for its datacentre business over a period of 20 months after signing on an unnamed Fortune 100 customer.

The telecommunications provider has two carrier-neutral hybrid intellicentres in Sydney and one in Canberra.

"We are also leveraging our investments in our datacentre facilities in Sydney and Canberra to drive profit growth," CEO David Tudehope said a year ago.

For FY16, Macquarie Telecom announced a net profit of AU$5.4 million, turning around FY15's AU$4.3 million net loss, attributing its success to growth across cloud services and government.

Its Telecoms business contributed AU$138.9 million in revenue, up 2.7 percent year on year, and Hosting Services added AU$68.4 million in revenue, a 10.9 percent increase.