OREANDA-NEWS. March 20, 2012. Symantec has doubled the capacity of its Symantec.cloud services in Australia in the last year by signing a three-year, multi-million dollar deal to co-locate servers and associated equipment in a Fujitsu data centre in Sydney, Australia. This investment will enable Symantec to meet growing business demand for secure, reliable and high-performance cloud services including email, endpoint, web and instant messaging security as well as backup and archiving solutions.

Symantec selected Fujitsu after issuing a competitive tender in mid-2011 for additional capacity to meet forecast demand for small business and enterprise cloud services. The co-location deal complements its existing Symantec.cloud capacity at a data centre run by Equinix, also located in Australia.

“Under this agreement, we have purchased space to install new servers and associated equipment in a Fujitsu data centre, and increased the availability of hosted services to our customers,” said Brenton Smith, vice president, Symantec.cloud, Asia-Pacific and Japan. “This new arrangement has also boosted the resilience of our cloud services infrastructure by enabling us to fail over between the Fujitsu and Equinix data centres as required.”

In addition, Fujitsu’s strict security accreditation and location of their data centre played a key role in Symantec’s decision.

“Fujitsu demonstrated the highest levels of compliance for security accreditation and robust data protection policies and processes. The added data centre infrastructure will provide resilient cloud services that will enable more customers in Australia to take full advantage of the benefits of cloud services which may include reduced capital expenditures and operational overheads, improved staff productivity, reduced business risk, and greater innovation,” added Smith.

Alistair Latham, group executive director, Infrastructure Solutions and Support, Fujitsu said, “We are delighted to be working with Symantec as a partner. Symantec’s choice of Fujitsu’s data centre to host their cloud services clearly demonstrates the depth and strength of the relationship with Symantec and validates our strategy where we made significant and early investment in data centres in this region. This investment is now paying off with high-profile engagements such as this.”

Smith said Symantec.cloud expected to see strong growth in demand for cloud services from small, medium and large businesses. “Many businesses planned to combine public clouds with their own internal cloud infrastructure to meet peaks and troughs in demand for IT resources without investing in additional data centre equipment,” he added.

Symantec also has additional data centres for its Symantec.cloud services in Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong to help meet growing customer demand for cloud services throughout the Asia Pacific and Japan region. This brings the total number of data centres for Symantec.cloud services to 18 globally.