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Amazon To Launch Sydney Data Center
schliz writes "Amazon Web Services will unveil its first Australian data centers on Tuesday, ending more than a year of speculation. The move is expected to address enterprises' data soverignty and latency concerns, although local cloud providers argue that data held by U.S. company Amazon would still be subject to the Patriot Act."
I agree with you 100%.
This is about as non-sensical as the Australian "president" who is a Christian and supports what he says ;)
Also, AWS already has a lot of their services avaialble in Singapore: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/
Contrary to popular belief, Australia's international *bandwidth* is not too bad, it's in the high 10's if not into the 100's of Gb/s in total now. Amazon already has a data centre in Singapore and services hosted there still suck. There are these things called round-trip-time and latency, which are actually much worse for the performance of interactive applications than lack of bandwidth alone. Having services hosted on continent will help out a lot, well, the eastern side anyway, Perth might still have some problems.
Nope, its true. I used to work for a US owned company in Australia - because of US law, we had to do everything in accordance with Sarbanes–Oxley. It was a royal pain in the ass - 100% pure bureaucracy - and just about doubled the work required to do most of our tasks.
Thankfully, I'm not working there anymore - but that little glimpse into American life really, really made me glad I wasn't working in IT in the US...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
It seems you have missed the point of the example of US law applying to US operations offshore.
Sounds like the legal team failed to properly setup a subsidiary.
The company I work for deals with complex legal matters. We have data center presence in Canada, APAC and Europe specifically to address the concerns of clients in those jurisdictions who do not want to be subjected to the uncertainties of the PATRIOT Act. It is possible to do it. The cloud providers are spouting FUD.
It's a pity then, that Tasmania is connected to the rest of the world via a dialup link.
Australia has several 10s of terabits of international capacity, of which around 2Tb (from memory) is actually "lit". There's 4 main cable systems (AJC, SCCS, PPC-1 and SeaMeWe-3), a few smaller ones to surrounding nations (JASURAUS, Gondwana-1) and a handful of multi-terabit modern ones that are barely ticking over (like Telstra Endeavour).
The growth in capacity has drawn quite a few international service providers and carriers to Aussie shores, and the resulting demand for domestic capacity has done nothing but good things for the price and availability of rack real estate and domestic transit. Our domestic providers are all pretty healthy, just waiting to see how the NBN pans out.
I can't see any problems with a big cloud provider like Amazon entering the market here. If it doesn't start forcing storage and bandwidth costs down further I'll be quite surprised.