As published in: ARN, CRN, ITWire, National Tribune

Newcastle, 20 January 2021 – Leading Edge Data Centres, Australia’s first dedicated edge data centre network provider, today announced it will be offering direct connectivity from its Newcastle Data Centre to leading public cloud providers via Megaport, a global leading Network as a Service (“NaaS”) provider.

 By utilising Megaport’s on-demand Software-Defined Network (SDN), Leading Edge Data Centre customers can combine their private cloud requirements with a direct on-ramp service to leading public clouds to meet their specific business needs. As a Megaport-enabled location, Leading Edge Data Centres will be able to offer its Newcastle customers:

• Choice: Direct private access to an industry-leading 215 cloud on-ramps and more than 700 on-net locations

• Security and Performance: Reliable, direct, private connections that bypass the public internet

• Marketplace: A global ecosystem of more than 350 service providers, including Alibaba, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, Rackspace and SAP

• Ease-of-Use: Delivered from the self-service easy-to-use Megaport Portal, Megaport services can be enabled and adjusted as required

• Optionality: Enable hybrid cloud, multicloud, and cloud-to-cloud architectures via point-and-click provisioning with the intelligent Megaport Cloud Router

• Performance: Localise applications and terminate traffic closer to the edge where performance matters

• Scalability: Elastic connectivity supports business needs and aligns to cloud consumption models

Our customers will have the ability to take a hybrid approach to data storage and compute functionality – keeping some applications in a traditional data centre environment like Leading Edge Data Centres, while also utilising the public cloud for flexible backup, storage and compute functions. This collaboration with Megaport allows our customers to simplify their connectivity to the cloud to only consume the services they need on a pay-as-you-go basis. It is easy to scale bandwidth up or down, giving customers much more flexibility for seasonality, responding to demand-based initiatives, or as their business grows – without making any significant infrastructure investments.

 “Leading Edge Data Centres chose to partner with Megaport to provide our customers choice when they connect to the cloud,” says Chris Thorpe, CEO of Leading Edge Data Centres. “Megaport provides options around on-demand, multicould connectivity with access to the broadest set of cloud on-ramps globally. Providing this capability is a huge benefit for our customers across regional Australia.”

“We are very pleased to be welcoming Leading Edge Data Centres to our growing ecosystem of data centre partners,” says Joshua Munro, Acting Chief Commercial Officer at Megaport. “The Megaport SDN simplifies connectivity for enterprises by removing many of the traditional cloud access complexities involving technical resources, capital costs, performance and security. Newcastle is one of the fastest-growing regions in Australia, and through our rich global network of service providers, businesses in the Hunter Region can choose and rapidly connect to the services that are right for their specific requirements and digital strategies.”

Munro adds, “We are pleased to partner with Leading Edge Data Centres to make cloud connectivity easy for their customers as we extend our platform reach and help more businesses in Newcastle get directly connected to the services they need.”