May 02, 2018

I have been working with, and mentoring Azure training classes for several years now, and some of the perennial questions that keep cropping up are around the issues of Azure security, compliance issues and foreign ownership requirements etc. Of course, Microsoft has always been focused quite heavily on security and compliance standards in Azure, but the new Microsoft datacentres in Canberra (online as of 3^rd April 2018 and dubbed Australia Central and Australia Central 2 regions) should finally alleviate any remaining concerns, particularly for government agencies.

These Canberra datacentres have been certified by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to host “protected-level” datasets for its Azure and Office 365 cloud services for government agencies. This is something that even AWS has not as yet achieved and comes on top of Microsoft’s “protected” certification for their Sydney and Melbourne facilities.

These 2 Canberra based datacentres are restricted to the community of Australian and New Zealand governments and critical national infrastructure sectors, along with their trusted partners, restricted under the heading of “essential services”. Also included are system integrators and managed service providers such as Accenture, Leidos, DXC, SAP and Veritas, as well as open source partners such as Red Hat. Entities wishing to use these facilities can check their eligibility via an online application form available here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/central-regions-eligibility/

To meet foreign ownership requirements, the Microsoft Datacentres in Canberra are actually hosted in the Canberra Data Centre’s (CDC) Fyshwick and Hume centres. CDC is a locally owned datacentre colocation provider, who currently have 4 datacentres running on 2 campuses in Canberra, (with a fifth datacentre due to be operational in September). CDC datacentres are already accredited for the handling of “top secret” defence classified data, and currently process a lot of that data across the federal government, with physical security, supply chain integrity and personnel security all addressed in their highly resilient data centres. Australian federal government customers can also tap into the point-to-point dark fibre network known as Intra Government Communications Network (ICON) for direct connectivity.

To find out more information on this and many more Azure topics, check out the comprehensive range of Azure related courses available at New Horizons Australia, ranging from basic fundamentals courses, to System Administrator/Infrastructure courses, to Developer and Web Services courses as well as specialized courses such as Identity Management, On-Premise and Azure Integration courses and Big Data with Azure HDInsight courses. And finally, check out the many Azure related blogs written by New Horizons and our experienced trainers – just type in the key word “Azure” in our blogs section.

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