Dell EMC’s Spanning, a cloud-to-cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup service, has opened a data center in Sydney, Australia in order to comply with the country’s stringent data sovereignty laws.

G’Dell mate

Spanning protects user data from potential sync errors, malicious acts and human error by allowing customers to take data from public cloud apps and store it in a separate cloud outside of its original infrastructure.

It performs daily granular back-ups but also on-demand backup, offering unlimited storage and restoration of files from a specific point in time.

Purchased by EMC in October 2014, Spanning already provided a backup service for Salesforce and Google Apps in Australia, but was unable to offer the same to Office 365.

While Salesforce data is not stored locally, and Google does not guarantee that customer data will remain in Australia, Microsoft is different.

CEO Jeff Errasmouspe told ZDnet: “Microsoft has data centers in Australia, and in order for us to provide backup we needed a data center in Australia as well.

“[Of] the 13 key [data sovereignty] policies, I believe eight of them are directly related to how data is treated, where it needs to sit, and the standards around those, and we comply with all eight.”

He added: “Being in the country is the last requirement we had to hit in order to be able to go ahead and successfully sell here.”