​Spanning by Dell EMC opens Australian datacentre for Microsoft 365 customers

Spanning by Dell EMC has announced the launch of a new datacentre in Sydney to allow customers in Australia and New Zealand to comply with local data storing requirements for their Microsoft Office 365 applications.

The Dell EMC company provides backup and recovery for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and lets users take data from Google Apps, Salesforce, and Microsoft 365 and store it in a separate cloud outside of original infrastructures so that organisations are covered in the event of data loss.

Spanning initially provided backup for Google Apps and added backup for Salesforce a couple of years later. The company only introduced Office 365 to its backup suite in 2014, with enterprise customers using it in beta form since 2015.

Although Spanning has been active in Australia for a while, it has only provided local backup for Google Apps and Salesforce applications.

According to Spanning VP and general manager Jeff Erramouspe, Australian organisations are adopting Office 365 at a faster rate than any other geography globally.

However, the company has not been able to provide customers with Office 365 backup previously, as there are strong data sovereignty issues in existence in Australia, Erramouspe said.

"Microsoft has datacentres in Australia, and in order for us to provide backup we needed a datacentre in Australia as well," he explained. "The 13 key [data sovereignty] policies, I believe eight of them are directly related to how data is treated, where it needs to sit, and the standards around those, and we comply with all eight."

As a result of a local presence, Spanning is now fully compliant with Australian Privacy Principles enforced under the Privacy Act.

Erramouspe explained that without a local presence, Spanning has not really been able to trial its offering down under, despite heavy interest from the federal, state, and local governments, as well as universities.

"Being in the country is the last requirement we had to hit in order to be able to go ahead and successfully sell here," Erramouspe said.

Although Google Apps is used by organisations in Australia and New Zealand, Google is geographically agnostic and does not guarantee that data will remain in Australia. Similarly, Erramouspe said most Salesforce users in Australia do not have their data stored locally; however, Spanning will likely introduce a regional-specific Salesforce backup offering in the future.

The Sydney datacentre is Spanning's second outside the US, following the launch of the company's first overseas datacentre in Dublin, Ireland, in September last year.

Spanning was scooped up by EMC in October 2014, alongside the purchase of two other cloud-focused organisations, Cloudscaling and Maginatics, with EMC hoping to bolster its hybrid cloud strategy.

Dell closed the $67 billion purchase of EMC in September to position itself as the one-stop shop for the entire IT stack.