We wanted to empower regional Australia by bringing critical IT infrastructure, connectivity and cloud services commonly used in metro Australia, to the bush.

Whether you’re working in the IT sector, or managing a regional business where you rely on your Managed Service Provider (MSP) to keep you online, improving and stabilising the technological landscape in the bush, and decreasing your businesses IT infrastructure downtime is a win-win.

You might already know that a data centre (DC) can provide a secure, climate-controlled home for your regional business IT infrastructure, improving your customer’s interactions with your business while reducing IT-related costs, but it also enables regional business communities to grow and compete in larger, shifting markets as Australia stretches out into the ‘new normal.’

What’s the ‘New Normal’ for Regional Australia?

Thanks to the pandemic, which saw metro-based workers head to the bush in the biggest migration to the regions since records began, we’re now more familiar with (and possibly weary of) terms like ‘pivot’, ‘hybrid’, ‘remote working’ and ‘buffering’. As a community we’ve updated the way we interact and work as humans, but have you considered how this will impact your business’s IT setup beyond pandemic band-aid fixes?

Pushing and pulling communities in different directions over skills, jobs, housing and technology access, the strain on regional IT infrastructure has tightened, and locals are now awakening to the many benefits of moving and colocating their IT infrastructure in their own local data centre.

Colocation means housing critical business IT infrastructure like production and backup servers, PBX phone systems and private clouds with other businesses IT infrastructure in a data centre, off-premises.

We’ve established data centres in many regional locations, primed and ready to back regional activation. This exciting period of growth brings opportunities for both local and national businesses to embed their operations in regional Australia. 

A reliable, sophisticated digital landscape also underpins economic growth by helping to attract innovative and highly qualified professionals, entrepreneurs and industry to regional areas. From government agencies and medicine to the logistics and industry 4.0 sectors, LEDC is part of the plan for a progressive and prosperous future for regional communities.

What are the benefits of colocating your IT infrastructure?

1. Increase your businesses resilience and reliability

Uptime Pretty Much All the Time

When you house your business’ IT infrastructure with LEDC, you’re increasing what we call the uptime of your businesses IT systems. Our DC designs are certified Tier III DCs by the uptime institute and are online for 99.985% through the year (or offline for about an hour and a half each year), meaning you can access your data at almost anytime.

Redundant Systems Keeping Your Business Online

There are multiple redundancy paths for power and cooling systems, and protocols in place to update and maintain our DCs. With N+1 redundancy, you have peace of mind should any of the DC components fail and need replacement or repair, your data can still be accessed.

By choosing to use one of our DCs, you reduce your risk of being impacted by events such as power outages and extreme weather conditions (floods, fire, storm damage) which on-premises servers and other IT infrastructure are vulnerable to. Additionally, should an issue arise at the data centre, it’s easier for local businesses to get support from local service providers, or access their IT infrastructure quickly, as it’s in the bush, not in a metro DC.

For a business to achieve a similar redundancy in-house, there’d have to be significant capital expenditure and investment in backup power through generators, UPS systems, and be reliant on current telecommunications infrastructure, which can be disrupted or damaged through environmental factors like poor weather. If a major event like a flood or fire hits a telco provider’s vast network or cables and connections, your business could be offline for days, perhaps weeks depending on the damage.

Maximise your data security

At LEDC, we’ve invested in stringent security measures to secure your equipment including CCTV monitoring, two-factor Bluetooth/facial recognition for access to our DCs and VESDA fire detection and suppression systems.

Regional businesses, including MSPs, can colocate their own, or their customer’s, critical data infrastructure inside one or more of our regional centres with confidence. LEDC can interconnect with other service providers to deliver unique, value-added services to their customers in regional Australia and beyond.

2. Access the Best Business Connectivity and Technology Available in the Bush

Create a Private Connection to Your IT Equipment

Storing, retrieving and using sensitive information that can’t be seen by anyone except your staff? You can deploy a private, layer 2 direct connection between the location of your business and our data centre.

Access Enterprise Ethernet With The NBN Co

Did you know you can use NBN Co’s Enterprise Ethernet product to connect to our DC? Using this product, you can either organise a layer 2 private or layer 3 public connection between your business and our DC. This is because we have deployed head ends to enable this service in our DCs, all we do is organise a cable to be cross-connected from this head end to the server in our DC you need this service to.

Take Advantage of Our DCI

Every Leading Edge Data Centre is connected to one another through our network Data Centre Interconnects (DCI). Secured a contract which includes the requirement to house backup or disaster recovery (DR) data? You can place your production server in our Newcastle DC, and your DR server in our Tamworth DC. If you ever need to perform maintenance on your production server, then you can switch your customer, or business, over to your DR server, maintaining uptime and business continuity.

Access Your Cloud Locally

Succumbing to the tyranny of distance and latency metro-based public clouds like AWS and Azure create when using them over a public internet connection? Our DCs have what are called public cloud express on ramps which are secure, private paths from our DCs to the public cloud of your choice.

Partner Ecosystem Opportunities

Need to deploy unique IT architecture and not sure who to ask? We’ve got a number of regionally located partners who use our DC network as the backbone to providing IT solutions for their communities. Contact Us and we’ll put you in touch with one today. 

3. Optimise Your Businesses IT Costs

Share the Energy Load

Have you ever tried to figure out how much energy your on-premise IT infrastructure is using? And then try to forecast what this cost might look like in 6 months to give you some idea of how exposed your business could be to spiralling energy prices in Australia?

Colocating your IT equipment in one of our DCs eliminates paying for energy consumed by your on-premise IT equipment. You simply receive one predictable, monthly bill inclusive of all charges from LEDC.

Minimise Maintenance Travel Costs 

If you are currently colocating your servers in a metro located DC, then you know the round trip expenses outlayed to travel to that location from the bush and perform maintenance. Colocating your IT equipment close to your customers reduces staff travel time speeds up maintenance procedures and gives the ability for your business to focus on more productive tasks.

Eliminate Accidents Caused by the Dreaded Fat Finger

Sometimes employees make IT mistakes, maybe due to their proactiveness in trying to resolve an IT issue without IT support, or accidentally fat-fingering a button by mistake like this Samsung employee did, costing $140 billion dollars. These potentially costly interactions between your staff and IT equipment are eliminated when you place your equipment in one of our DCs, where only qualified and authorised staff can access it.

Ready to take a look?

Now you’re across the key benefits of increased business resilience, maximised security and reduced cost, you might have some questions about how and when to colocate with LEDC. 

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