Digital resilience starts with the right infrastructure

Digital resilience isn't built on a single platform or provider. It emerges from deliberate choices about where workloads run, how environments connect, and who you trust to keep critical systems available when it matters most.

Datacom is helping organisations across Australasia strengthen their digital resilience through sovereign data centres, cloud and hybrid architecture, and integrated infrastructure services. Here's how some of that work is taking shape. 

For more than a decade, Fulton Hogan has trusted Datacom with its mission-critical infrastructure. With over 10,000 staff and dozens of complex projects running simultaneously, Fulton Hogan relies on Datacom data centres on both sides of the Tasman for 24/7 access to everything from payroll and asset management to financial applications.

The arrangement is backed by Datacom's 100 percent uptime SLA covering power, cooling and security. Datacom's ISO certifications and strict access controls support Fulton Hogan's compliance requirements – essential for major utilities contracts where certification is non-negotiable.

"It just makes business easy when you're doing it with people that you can trust," says Shirley McDonald, Group IT Operations Manager at Fulton Hogan. "We consider Datacom to be part of the Fulton Hogan team because we are both invested in the same outcome. 

Resilient organisations avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to infrastructure. Instead, they design environments where workloads run in the location that best meets their needs for performance, security, cost and sovereignty.

This might include:

• Public cloud for scalable, elastic workloads
• Private cloud for sensitive systems and controlled environments
• Sovereign data centres for critical infrastructure and regulated data
• Edge environments for applications requiring low latency
• Hybrid environments to combine private control and public flexibility

By placing the right workloads in the right environments, organisations can build infrastructure that is more flexible, resilient and ready to support future demands.  

Data centres are the backbone of Australasia's digital economy. The recent NZTech report Data Centres: Powering Aotearoa's Digital Future forecast over $10 billion in investment over the next decade, with the sector already underpinning $16.5 billion in ICT GDP.

But as Matt Neil, Datacom's Director of Data Centres, says: "Demand is accelerating faster than supporting infrastructure. Without coordinated action, we risk bottlenecks that could stall growth."

At Datacom, sustainability is embedded in how data centres are designed, built and operated. Facilities run at industry-leading efficiency with Power Usage Effectiveness as low as 1.2, and every site is built on N+1 or N+2 redundancy with 24/7 onsite support. 

AI workloads place different demands on infrastructure than traditional applications. Training and running models requires high-performance compute, fast access to large datasets and environments that can support sustained processing loads.

Key considerations for preparing your infrastructure include:

• GPU-enabled infrastructure capable of supporting intensive AI and machine learning workloads
• Data locality and sovereignty to ensure sensitive data remains protected and compliant
• Scalable compute environments that can expand as models, datasets and usage grow
• Power and cooling capacity to support the density and energy demands of AI processing

Building digital resilience means designing infrastructure that can support these workloads reliably today, while remaining flexible enough to scale as AI adoption accelerates. 

Geopolitical risk, cyber threats and recent outages are driving a rethink of how organisations protect the infrastructure powering their operations. Mark Hile, Datacom's Managing Director of Infrastructure Products, says Australia stands at an inflection point.

"We must either double down on building trusted, regionally owned technology infrastructure or risk losing strategic control to offshore interests and uncertain supply chains."

Datacom's GPU-as-a-service is live in New Zealand and coming to Australia, allowing public and private sector clients to undertake secure AI inference without risk of IP leakage or regulatory breach. "Sovereignty is about choices," Hile says. "And now more than ever, those choices must be made with eyes wide open."