SAP establishes Canberra-based (and -centric) private cloud

Published on the 20/04/2016 | Written by Newsdesk


SAP private cloud

Onshore deployment of cloud services for Australian public sector aimed at solving data residency dilemma…

SAP Australia has introduced a HANA Enterprise Cloud service with the Australian Government Shared Services Centre as its first customer. The location of the new service reflects government’s odd relationship with the cloud: it’s a great idea, but it still has to be physically close to the capital. It also has to be private.

No surprises, then, that the cloud service is indeed private and hosted presumably within eyesight of Parliament House, in the Canberra Data Centre. SAP touts it as ‘the first cloud service of its kind in the Australian Capital Territory [which] is specifically equipped to support Australian Federal Government agencies in innovating citizen-centric services’.

The newly introduced service is being used by the Shared Services Centre for the Departments of Employment and Education and Training for a range of back office activities including payroll processing and financial services.

In late 2015, SAP announced the establishment of an Institute for Digital Government and, more recently, fingered the public sector and financial services industries as key sectors it is targeting in Australia.

In a statement, SAP described the service as running in a private, fully managed cloud with subscription-based pricing for its software and infrastructure. Interestingly, perhaps, the statement goes on to note that the service is built on HP Enterprise tin, notwithstanding the German giant’s 2014 announcement that SAP HANA would be going into IBM’s Sydney and Melbourne data centres. Those facilities are clearly out of eyeshot from Canberra – though SAP did go on to note that the most recent investment is part of a global strategy to provide ‘full security and regional data compliance’.

SAP Australia’s public services GM Damien Bueno, said the company is ‘committed to scaling capabilities…for public sector customers’ and noted that more Australian Federal agencies could make use of the cloud model; “We believe all tiers of government can realise their capacity for digital innovation. The new Canberra facility also addresses the requirements of many Australian Federal agencies that are eager to apply the real-time capabilities of in-memory computing in the cloud, but have concerns about hosting data offshore.”

The ‘in-memory’ to which Bueno refers describes a feature of HANA applications, which access a database which resides in computer memory rather than disk storage mechanisms.

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