Telstra launches UK, Asia cloud platform

Telstra will expand its cloud offering into Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, the company announced today.

Telstra already has datacentres located in Australia, but as part of the company's AU$800 million investment in cloud services, it is now moving to deploy in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UK in order to serve multinational customers across the globe.

"The extension of Telstra's cloud infrastructure offering represents an ongoing commitment to innovation, and has been designed to provide customers with an exceptional experience by combining the flexibility of cloud computing along with the resilience of a world-class global network," Telstra global president and managing director Martijn Blanken said in a statement.

Telstra will offer virtual servers, dedicated servers, storage and backup, firewalls and VPNs, and management services as part of the cloud offering in Asia and the UK. Blanken said that the offering will be flexible to the model of cloud services that customers want, where their service is located.

"Our service is designed with customer experience at its core, and provides optional disaster recovery and off-site backup capabilities to combat security concerns, and a single service-level agreement across hosting infrastructure and network connectivity to help ensure optimal performance of customer applications within the datacentre and assist in securing transmission of data across the wide-area network (WAN)," Blanken said.

A Telstra spokesperson said that the services will be up and running towards the end of this year.

In Australia, Telstra is in the process of building a new AU$100 million datacentre in Victoria to add to its three existing datacentres as part of the overall five-year cloud strategy announced in 2011.