The Hodgman Liberal Government is delivering on our commitment to attract a Tier-3 data centre to Tasmania. Perth-based data centre operator Red Cloud is proceeding with plans for a $40 million data centre in Tasmania having finalised the purchase of 7000 sqm in the Spark Business Centre at Cambridge.
Red Cloud expects the development to create around 80 local jobs during construction and an additional 17 when operational.
In December last year the government released the Tasmanian Data Centre Action Strategy which outlined 12 actions to encourage further development of data centres within Tasmania.
We now have the right business conditions, the strategic vision, and the confidence and dynamism within the IT industry for businesses like Red Cloud to invest in Tasmania.
The Red Cloud data centre will be our first Tier-3 data centre – it will have military-grade security modules as well as energy-saving technologies.
This will give the state a highly resilient facility for on-island data and we expect it to form part of the Tasmanian Cloud.
This success is part of a coordinated vision for IT in Tasmania that stretches from coding in primary schools through to support for IT career planning and work experience.
This includes our new Innovation Hubs in Hobart and Launceston; the Digital Ready program, the free wifi network, and within government the Networking Tasmania-III program with DcaaS and IaaS (data centre as a service and infrastructure as a service) as part of the Tasmanian Cloud.
The Red Cloud data centre is good news for Tasmania, good news for our dynamic and expanding IT industry and good news for Tasmanian jobs.
The target completion date is September 2017.
