Australia’s Department of Defence has delayed its exit from Global Switch’s Sydney-based data center by up to five years. The DoD first made plans to make exit the Sydney facility into its own data center in 2017, saying there was a security risk after Chinese steel giant Shagang made its first investment in Global Switch. The original plan – estimated to cost AU$200m – was to leave by the time the contract expired in 2020.
But the department extended its tenure in the facility in a AU$53.5 million deal in October last year after the migration plans were delayed due to the scale of the undertaking. The new contract at the Switch Sydney East / West Data Center facility in Ultimo runs until September 2025.
A spokesperson told iTnews that while some of the migration to an alternative data center has been completed, “the size of the Defence holdings made it impractical to migrate all the holdings from the data centre prior to the expiry of the Defence lease in September 2020.”...MORE
