ASIC swaps Global Switch for Canberra Data Centres

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission will start moving out of Global Switch’s Sydney-based data centre later this year after signing a four-year deal with Canberra Data Centres.

Under the $4.2 million contract published this week, the corporate watchdog said it will migrate its secondary data centre to CDC’s Eastern Creek facility in Western Sydney.

Global Switch has been home to the data centre since ASIC made the decision to consolidate its data storage facilities in 2013.

ASIC’s primary data centre is housed within a Fujitsu data centre in Homebush – a contract that was recently renewed for a further five years at a cost of $7.4 million.

The migration from Global Switch to CDC for the secondary centre is slated to begin later this year, well ahead of the expiry of ASIC’s 10-year contract with Global Switch in August 2023.

A spokesperson told iTnews that “CDC was chosen as a supplier that best fits ASIC requirements in the future”.

Sydney-based IT consultancy Diaxion is providing project management consultancy services to ASIC for the relocation, which is expected to be completed by July 2022.

ASIC is the latest federal government agency to reveal plans to leave Global Switch since it became majority owned by Chinese steel maker Shagang Group in 2019.

The planned departure comes hot on the heels of the Australian Taxation Office, which began its migration from Global Switch to CDC last year under a 10-year, $73.1 million contract.

Both agencies have made moves to leave the facility since a government directive demanded that agencies leave the data centre by September 2020, according to the Australian Financial Review.

The Global Switch exodus by the federal government has contributed to the growing dominance of CDC in the data centre space.

Last month, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute issued a warning over the growing concentration of government data centre outsourcing.

In its 'devolved data centre decision report' [pdf], the thinktank found half of all current federal government data centre contracts were with one data centre provider.

“Contracts with the dominant provider totalled $620 million, or 79 percent,” it said after analysing 87 current data centre contracts on AusTender.

“The next largest providers by value were $32 million (4 percent), $28 million (3.6 percent) and $14 million (1.7 percent).”

While the paper does not name the dominant data centre provider, it is widely understood to be Canberra Data Centres, which is used by a raft of federal government agencies.

These agencies include Home Affairs, Defence, Services Australia, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Finance, CSIRO and the Australian Electoral Commission.

But with the planned arrival of Macquarie Telecom’s new Canberra data centre, CDC could face greater competition for government contracts in the coming months.

The 1.5 megawatt (MW) facility, dubbed Intellicentre 5 (IC5), is expected to eventally increase the capacity of Macquarie’s Canberra campus to 4MW.