Published on the 19/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Bucking trends set by rival cloud vendors Salesforce will not offer an Australian instance of its services before 2015 at the earliest…
While companies such as Amazon, HP, BMC, Fujitsu and Rackspace have all established local cloud computing hubs to meet the latency and data sovereignty requirements of Australian and New Zealand customers, Salesforce is still holding out.
In 2011 Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff made a commitment to open an Australian data centre for users of its customer relationship management systems – it has now confirmed that won’t be before 2015 at the earliest.
The company’s co-founder, Parker Harris, said that although the company is currently building a data centre in the UK to serve the needs of European customers there were no plans to build an Australian data centre at least for the next year.
Australia is one of the company’s seven largest markets worldwide, and Harris said that “it’s not a case of if, but when?” for a local data centre. For the present however the company is hosting all customer data out of data centres in the US and Japan, with the UK facility yet to come on line.
Yet as Salesforce pushes further into the enterprise space – particularly government, financial services and healthcare – the data sovereignty issue will be magnified for its customers.
Similarly the release of Salesforce1, the newly announced development platform which replaces Force.com and allows organisations to collect much more information from their customers’ mobile devices, will throw data sovereignty issues into sharp relief.
Harris nominated analytics as one of the major growth areas for Salesforce in the next five years. The question for Australian and New Zealand enterprises will be to determine how comfortable their customers will be about that personal data being held overseas and then mined for value.
Having personal data held offshore might also prove a bridge too far for large enterprises that are bound by regulation regarding the treatment and location of customer data.
There is little question that the Salesforce data centres are robust and secure, and US cloud companies have done a good job allaying Australian concerns about the likelihood of the US Patriot Act being used to allow data reserves to be accessed by US authorities, but following the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA snooping on private citizens, consumers could be excused for lingering doubts about the extent to which their personal information is held in the US.
The author attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
