Australia’s rich culture of innovation is deeply entrenched in its entrepreneurial spirit, appetite for experimentation, and passion to address big challenges. As evidence, Australia’s 2021–2022 federal budget launched the Digital Economy Strategy, a vision for the country to become a top 10 digital economy and society by 2030. To help Australia achieve this ambitious goal, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is committed to providing world-leading information technology (IT) infrastructure that powers Australians’ everyday lives.
AWS has launched Australia’s second AWS infrastructure Region, a physical location around the world where we cluster data centers. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region brings the latest AWS technologies—from compute and storage to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning—closer to even more customers, delivering lower network latency and helping customers address local data-residency requirements.
Deepening AWS’s commitment to the nation
AWS’s investment in Australia stretches back to 2012, when we opened our first Australian AWS Region in Sydney. Since then, we have invested more than AU$8 billion in local infrastructure and jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of customers each month. Today, AWS customers include many of Australia’s leading local and international brands, like ANZ Bank, Atlassian, Canva, Cochlear, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, FrontierSI, Littlepay, National Australia Bank, Optus, PEXA Group, Pizza Hut, RMIT University, Telstra, University of Melbourne, Victorian Land Registry Services, and Woodside Energy.
NAB is one of Australia’s largest banks and Australia’s largest business bank. “We have been exploring the potential use cases with AWS since the announcement of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region. Locating key banking applications and critical workloads geographically close to our mainframe compute platform and the bulk of our corporate workforce will provide lower latency benefits, streamline our disaster recovery procedures, and further increase our resilience and availability.”
AWS also released an economic impact study estimating that the company’s projected spending on the construction and operation of the new infrastructure Region will create an annual average of more than 2,500 full-time jobs at local vendors through a planned $4.5 billion (AU$6.8 billion) investment in Australia in 2022–2037. AWS also estimates that the new Region will add $10.6 billion (AU$15.9 billion) to the Australian gross domestic product (GDP) by 2037.
“FrankieOne is thrilled to be among the first customers using the new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region. As a critical service provider to some of the largest financial institutions in the world, our customers trust us to be available 24/7. With the introduction of the new Melbourne Region, we can now offer geographic failover in real time while keeping our Australian customer data onshore. This is a game changer for our business continuity and disaster recovery processes. AWS has been an incredibly supportive partner since our inception. We’re excited to continue this relationship and look forward to growing together.”
The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region follows other AWS infrastructure investments in Australia, which are bringing the cloud closer to customers that need lower latency. Last year, we revealed plans to bring AWS Local Zones—infrastructure that places compute, storage, databases, and other select AWS services close to large population and industry centers— to Australia in Brisbane (announced) and Perth (now generally available). AWS Local Zones help local organizations across industries such as health care, financial services, and mining and resources deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency. This allows consumers to access services faster, driving more positive customer experiences. In addition to Local Zones, seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations are also available across the country to help securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds.
“Customers around the world are using AWS Regions to leverage advanced technologies, save costs, accelerate innovation, increase speed to market of new products and services, and expand their geographic infrastructure footprint in minutes. Today’s launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will also allow our customers focused on high availability to design their applications to run across multiple in-country Regions, achieving greater fault tolerance and business continuity."
Transforming citizen services with the most secure cloud
Every month, our local infrastructure is used by hundreds of thousands of active customers, and many trust us with highly sensitive and secure workloads. These include large public sector organizations like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Taxation Office, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
AWS was one of the first cloud providers certified as a Strategic Hosting Provider in the Australian government’s Hosting Certification Framework in 2021. To date, more than 130 AWS capabilities available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region have been assessed by the Information Security Registered Assessors Program for operating workloads at the PROTECTED level, which is the highest Australian government data classification attainable for public cloud services. This increased level of certification means organizations can build applications on AWS that meet the Australian government’s security requirements for highly sensitive workloads. The new AWS Region in Melbourne also meets these criteria and is covered by the Australian government’s Hosting Certification Framework.
In April 2022, AWS and the federal Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) extended a 2019 agreement to enable Australian federal, state, and territory agencies and departments, as well as public universities and government-controlled corporations, to access AWS through a simple contracting model. This centralized agreement lets agencies save costs from the day they sign up through DTA to help them accelerate the launch of innovative citizen services.
“Australian citizens expect seamless and personalized access to government services anywhere and anytime. Today’s launch of an AWS Region in Melbourne will be a key enabler for the Victorian government and other public sector customers to help meet this demand. Our investment in infrastructure and digital skills training will further help the public sector better serve citizens with innovative and secure services built using the cloud to meet and exceed the expectations of Australians.”
Closing the digital skills gap
At AWS, we remain committed to helping individuals, businesses, and governments upskill the workforce and equip individuals with the necessary and relevant digital skills for the future. We collaborate with industries, government organizations, education providers, and customers to cultivate the next generation of cloud professionals and build a diverse pipeline of cloud talent by upskilling and reskilling Australians. Since 2017, AWS has trained more than 200,000 people across Australia with cloud skills. To help meet the growing demand for individuals with cloud skills, AWS has pledged to train 29 million people around the world with free cloud training by 2025.
In July 2020, AWS launched AWS re/Start, a cohort-based training program, with the Australian cohort being the first in the Asia-Pacific region. One of the organizations we collaborated with was Goanna Solutions, a leading Indigenous Australian-owned technology enterprise, to provide a free 12-week program equipping learners with the fundamentals of cloud computing, paving the way for entry level jobs in the IT industry. And at AWS re:Invent 2022, we announced the expansion of our AWS Skill Builder program, providing individuals, organizations, and AWS Partners with highly interactive, digital cloud skills training opportunities.
Innovating for a sustainable future
Building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet is something we care deeply about.
Amazon is committed to investing in sustainability across our businesses to drive down our carbon emissions. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge and became the first signatory while setting ambitions to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early and becoming net-zero carbon by 2040. Canva was AWS’s first Australian customer to sign the pledge, in 2021.
Powering our operations with 100% renewable energy is central to meeting this commitment. We are on an accelerated path to power our global operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.
Amazon is also the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy. We have made three renewable investments in Australia—a wind farm in Victoria and two solar farms in New South Wales. Once operational, these three renewable energy projects are expected to generate 717,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually, the equivalent of the annual power use of almost 115,000 homes.
With AWS, local organizations can also drive energy efficiencies across their business. According to a study conducted by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, computing in the cloud is five times more energy efficient than on-premises data centers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Lovisa is a fashion jewelry and accessory retail chain with over 675 stores in 26 countries. “Since migrating our workloads to AWS in 2022, we have improved our data processing speeds by 65%, allowing quicker access to data that helps us deliver seamless and more personalized shopping experiences. We’re opening new retail stores every week, which means we need to easily scale up new services at a moment’s notice. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region gives us the additional capacity to accelerate our growing omnichannel capabilities globally and improve the performance of our digital retail platform."
Supporting Australia’s digital transformation
The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will accelerate innovation and growth by providing customers with even more options to run workloads with greater resilience and availability, securely store data in Australia, and deliver even lower latency for customers. Digital transformation across Australia’s private and public sectors is well underway, and AWS is committed to supporting the country’s thriving economy driven by our entrepreneurial spirit, appetite for experimentation, and a passion to address the big challenges that Australians face.
“CMD Solutions a company of Mantel Group is an AWS specialist professional services consultancy, and the 2022 AWS Migration Partner of the Year and AWS Services Partner of the Year in Australia. With eight AWS Competencies, including machine learning and security, CMD Solutions demonstrates deep expertise in helping customers implement highly secure and innovative cloud solutions. “Security is the cornerstone for our offerings, as many of our customers from the financial services and public sector deal with sensitive information like PII, financial records and patient data. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will help us continue to meet strict data sovereignty and compliance requirements as we help more customers modernise with the cloud. For example, we helped online healthcare solutions provider Midnight Health scale its platform, which connects patients with doctors, specialists, and pharmacists through services like telehealth, to more users while keeping confidential patient data safe.”
You can learn more about the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region here.
