Australia has progressed to now be one of the four major sub-markets for data centres in Asia alongside Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.
As data centres become larger and more efficient, new data centres are generally being built in centralised areas, mainly in the larger cities of Sydney and Melbourne, in order to achieve the required economies of scale. Both cities have developed to become regional hubs for large enterprises across a range of industries.
Data centre customers are migrating from co-location services and managed hosting to cloud services. Cloud providers are the fastest growing segment of most Australian data centre providers. There is a growing demand from corporate and government organisations looking to move their systems to the cloud with a private or hybrid cloud architecture. This is placing significant pressure on data centre providers that focus on co-location, especially for wholesale data centre providers.
The presence of different types of enterprises across a wide range of industries is attracting both local and international cloud providers to carrier neutral exchanges. The diversity and number of local and international cloud providers entering Australian data centres has significantly increased over the last five to seven years.
The growing presence of international cloud providers has also been particularly strong over the last three years. A growing trend is for these large public cloud providers to lease large amounts of floor space from specialist data centre providers located in Australia and operate their own data centres within these facilities.
A large amount of data centre capacity has been added over the last one or two years in Australia. This has led to lower than average occupancy rates in the short-term and is placing downward pressure on pricing.
Strong local demand has seen significant investment in new builds from both local data centre specialist providers such as NEXTDC and Canberra Data Centres (CDC) and global data specialist providers such as Equinix. These operators have significantly expanded their local presence significantly over the last couple of years. New providers such as Airtrunk and Data Exchange Network are also entering the local market. This trend is expected to continue over the next year as more data capacity will enter the market, from new and existing providers.
Strong growth is predicted to continue over the next five years to 2024.
The top category of data centre providers in Australia are data centre specialist providers, which indicates the level of maturity in the Australian market. As the Australian data centre market has matured, IT Service Providers and telcos, have been retreating from the market.
Recent growth in South East Asia has been driven by the international expansion of mainland Chinese players and cloud service providers in Asia, and strong migration to outsourced data centres by enterprises pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy. Australia is the leading adopter of hybrid and provide cloud solutions across South East Asia. Other advanced countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong are now following in their path.