Macquarie opens $17m secure data centre in ACT

Macquarie Data Centres and Macquarie Government have jointly launched a new $17 million data centre in Canberra to store classified government data.

The new Intellicentre 5 (IC5) data centre has been purpose built to house the most highly classified federal government workloads.

The fully sovereign data centre has been built to Tier IV and to Security Construction and Equipment Committee (SCEC) Zone 5 specifications, and will be supported by over 150 Defence Negative Vetting 1 (NV1) certified government-cleared engineers operating a 24x7x365 support centre.

According to Macquarie Telecom, the project alone supported over 400 construction and related industry roles in the ACT, and the company has increased its workforce of cybersecurity engineers by 25% since construction commenced in July 2020.

The build forms part of the more than $100 million invested in the construction of secure, sovereign Australian data centres in Sydney and Canberra by Macquarie in 2020, marking a record investment year for the company.

Construction of the facility was completed on time and on budget by December 2020 despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, and in contrast to the overall industry-wide 10.4% decline in data centre infrastructure spending during the year, as estimated by Gartner.

“Data and cloud demand has skyrocketed as the pandemic continues to bring forward years’ worth of IT and digital transformation projects,” Macquarie Data Centres Group Executive David Hirst said.

“Ensuring that data remains secure, sovereign and within Australia’s borders is vital to protecting our national security and privacy interests — this facility embodies that need in every way.”

Image courtesy Macquarie Data Centres.