AZs, APAC, M&A, multi-cloud and migrations
It was another busy week across the sector that was highlighted by the ongoing global cloud build out.
Speaking to the pace and scope of the building, Microsoft confirmed that it would now start to build out availability zones in its cloud infrastructure locations, while AWS confirmed plans to add a new region in the Middle East.
The Asia-pacific region continues to be busy. A much anticipated development saw AirTrunk in Australia bring online its new wholesale facility in Sydney. AirTrunk is building out in large multi-MW blocks and is supporting massive-scale cloud deployments. Singapore remains the region’s top market and ST Telemedia began construction of a sixth facility in Singapore. Meanwhile, there were reports circulating that a wealthy Singaporean tycoon is looking to put a large amount of capital into the data centre and artificial intelligence markets. In other geographies, Google acquired land in Luxembourg and there are more large-scale builds taking place in Norway and Virginia.
The move to cloud comes with an inherent amount of stickiness for the provider. But that doesn’t mean organizations won’t move from clouds or hedge their bets. The NYT moved a popular online game from AWS to Google, for example, and we saw a couple cases of multi-cloud usage – both coming from the SaaS worlds.
The move to cloud involves so much data that providers have resorted to moving things physically. IBM released its answer to the AWS Snowball to help organizations ship large quantities of data to the cloud.
Elsewhere, the managed third party cloud market continues to move forward. Rackspace extended its managed Azure offerings for compliance-sensitive scenarios and Claranet shared some insight on its recent momentum in this segment.
Not to be overlooked, strategic activity continued. On the M&A side, 365 Data Centers acquired Florida’s Host.net, while vXchnge and Interoute accessed new sources of capital.
We also have some interesting data points from the likes of UKFast, CenturyLink and Ikoula.
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