NEXTDC Limited (ASX: NXT), Australia's leading Data-Centre-as-a-Service provider today announced that CloudFlare, the leading internet performance and security company, has arrived in Melbourne at NEXTDC's M1 data centre.

Launched in 2009 in San Francisco, USA, the CloudFlare network optimises any website, mobile app or API in order to improve load times and performance, and also blocks threats, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

With more than five percent of global web requests passing through its network each month, CloudFlare continues to expand its next-generation content delivery network (CDN) and security platform. CloudFlare's deployment in Melbourne marks its 34th data centre globally, and its third in Oceania following deployments in Sydney and Auckland, New Zealand.

"CloudFlare is committed to building the world's most performant and secure network, and our expansion into Melbourne ensures greater performance and content localisation in Australia," said Joshua Motta, director of special projects at CloudFlare. "We chose NEXTDC because of its trusted reputation and dense interconnection environment. Adding a new data centre in Melbourne is just one more way CloudFlare is improving the speed and reliability of our two million customers' applications in the Oceania region."

Once an application is a part of the CloudFlare network, its internet-facing traffic is routed through their intelligent global network. CloudFlare also provides other services like web content optimisation, security, traffic analytics and a range of apps to make the maintenance of internet applications fast, safe and simple.

NEXTDC's CEO Craig Scroggie comments, "CloudFlare's presence at M1 has opened up new possibilities for Australian organisations doing business internationally, and illustrates the importance to the domestic market of data centres like M1 that offers a world-class service to the world's leading IT companies and encourages their investment in Australia."

The M1 facility in Port Melbourne is the city's largest and most connected colocation data centre, and the presence of international CDN providers like CloudFlare continues to expand and develop the diversity of M1's unique ecosystem of carriers and IT services providers of all kinds.

Rated by Deloitte in their APAC Tech Fast 500 as the Asia-Pacific's fastest-growing telecommunications company and No.1 on Deloitte Australia's 2014 Tech Fast 50, NEXTDC's quality-first design philosophy saw the company win a 2015 Uptime Institute Brill Award for Efficient IT in the Product Solutions category for the APAC region; and NEXTDC's S1 data centre presented with the inaugural 2014 DatacenterDynamics APAC Award for "Innovation in the Mega-Data Centre".

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