Macquarie Telecom to offer cloud services out of Microsoft Azure
The cloud services arm of Macquarie Telecom has announced a partnership with Microsoft, allowing the Australian company to offer Azure managed services.
With Macquarie Cloud Services officially launching its Azure practice, the company can now also manage cloud workloads offshore for Australian-headquartered businesses.
"Partnership remains firmly within Microsoft's DNA, and our business market segments see high adoption of Microsoft technologies -- so combined with our existing relationship, our undiluted focus on Azure makes perfect sense," said Naran McClung, who will lead the dedicated Azure practice.
See also: Microsoft Azure: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
"We've invested heavily in people, accreditations, product development automation, and we're helping Australian businesses embrace Azure to its fullest expression. This will lead to successful migrations, cost savings and predictability, refined IT architecture, and true cloud-native operations for our customers."
Macquarie has already been working with Microsoft to provide Azure managed services to a number of customers and said the latest arrangement expands its cloud offering, enabling it to bring public cloud into its managed hybrid IT services.
The company expects the new practice will complement its existing cloud, hosting, data centre, and telco businesses.
"Our customers want to maximise their value from Azure and adapt with the platform as it evolves. They look to us for insights, facilitated change and the assurance of our ongoing focus," McClung added.
See also: Microsoft partners with Canberra Data Centres to cash in on government IT spend
Macquarie Government, another arm of the Macquarie Telecom Group, last year announced a new offering, a security operations centre as-a-service (SOCaaS) targeted at government agencies in Australia.
The new centre provides full cybersecurity coverage, including 24/7 event monitoring and alert response.
"Government agencies often struggle to attract strong security talent and they need these scarce resources focused on much more than monitoring," Macquarie Government MD Aidan Tudehope said.
"SOCaaS places that role in the hands of reliable professionals whose sole job is to manage it, freeing government resources to focus on other security tasks."
The company touted its SOCaaS as "enhancing Australian sovereign cybersecurity capabilities".
This was followed by the company in December scoring a AU$20 million contract with the Australian Taxation Office to deliver secure internet gateway and cybersecurity services.
Macquarie Telecom has Unclassified DLM certification for its GovZone (launch) offering, which it received in March 2017 from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). Prior to that, Macquarie Telecom's managed cloud service was initially given the security tick by the ASD in May 2015 to make it the first Australian cloud provider to be listed on the federal government's certified list.
RELATED COVERAGE
MacGov says Australian government is becoming stifled by cloud vendor lock-in
Macquarie Government's MD details how sending everything to the one vendor has left Commonwealth entities in a similar situation to the one they were in before.
MacTel announces government cloud expansion
Macquarie Telecom has announced datacentre capacity expansions, as well as government cloud and cybersecurity growth to the tune of an additional AU$1.5 million in opex.
Macquarie stands up Australian health cloud
The Macquarie Launch Health Cloud is a private cloud developed by the Australian heavyweight specifically for the healthcare sector.
MacTel announces AU$85m Macquarie Park datacentre expansion
Macquarie Telecom has said it will be expanding its Macquarie Park Intellicentre in a staged process, with the first part to cost between AU$75 million and AU$85 million in capex during 2019.