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TEAM Cloud Is Now DIA-Certified - Here’s Why That Matters

& what it means for cloud architecture, compliance & risk

3 Min Read

When it comes to selecting a cloud platform for high-trust workloads—especially across public sector and regulated industries—compliance is not optional, and sovereignty is strategic.

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With both of its isolated New Zealand regions now officially certified under the DIA’s (GCDO) Public Cloud Data Centre Certification (PCDCC) framework, TEAM Cloud is the first New Zealand Cloud Services Provider to achieve this milestone. Moreover, we are New Zealand owned and operated. This is more than a badge of honour—it’s a signal to CIOs, enterprise architects, and risk leaders that secure, scalable, sovereign cloud infrastructure is now a viable option right here in Aotearoa.

 

What Is DIA PCDCC and Why Does It Matter?

The Public Cloud Data Centre Certification (PCDCC) framework is part of the New Zealand Government’s response to increased demand for public cloud services that meet the requirements of the:

  • NZ Information Security Manual (NZISM)

  • Protective Security Requirements (PSR)

  • Cloud First Policy

  • Privacy Act 2020 and relevant regulatory frameworks

It defines baseline physical and digital security controls for cloud data centre environments. Achieving certification means a provider has undergone detailed scrutiny by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and meets standards around:

  • Physical access control and surveillance

  • Logical segregation of tenants and data

  • Incident response, logging, and monitoring

  • Resilience and failover

  • Governance and change management processes

 

The Technical Edge: Why It Matters to Architects

From a solution architecture and deployment standpoint, TEAM Cloud’s dual PCDCC regions deliver a number of distinct advantages for public sector and enterprise architects:

Dual-region high availability

Both regions—Auckland North (AKN) and Auckland West (AKW)—are logically and physically connected within an isolated single realm, offering robust failover and disaster recovery (DR) support for mission-critical workloads.

Segregation & compliance assurance

Isolation policies and tenancy models enforced under PCDCC guidelines offer assurance against noisy neighbour risk, shared tenancy exposure, and jurisdictional ambiguity.

Policy-aligned infrastructure

Government agencies and partners can now align their deployments directly to Cloud First and NZISM mandates without compromise. Architects can standardise on NZ-hosted IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid models that meet formal government assurance benchmarks.

Simplified assurance reporting

Having a PCDCC infrastructure simplifies risk assessments and security reviews and can reduce overhead in internal audits, privacy impact assessments, and board-level governance.

Security, But Also Sovereignty

Unlike global hyperscalers, TEAM Cloud is 100% New Zealand-owned and operated by TEAM IM—a long-standing leader in secure content, data, and cloud services across New Zealand and Australia.

That means:

  • No exposure to foreign access laws like the U.S. CLOUD Act

  • All support, monitoring, and operations teams are based in NZ

  • Full alignment with New Zealand privacy, security, and data governance expectations

For government CIOs, this addresses a key strategic question:

How do we adopt cloud at scale without exposing citizens’ data to offshore control or compliance risk?

TEAM Cloud’s certified, sovereign regions now answer that question clearly.

 

When Should You Consider Moving Workloads to TEAM Cloud?

TEAM Cloud is well-suited for:

  • Agencies modernising legacy systems that were previously in on-prem or bespoke data centres

  • Workloads requiring elevated assurance, such as identity systems, registries, or education/health data

  • Private-sector organisations working under public sector contracts or needing New Zealand residency and sovereignty for sensitive data

  • Organisations preparing for audits or recertifications under PSR, NZISM, or ISO 27001

  • Repatriating existing workloads from overseas cloud providers for performance and cost savings initiatives 

 

What’s Next?

TEAM Cloud’s roadmap includes continuous improvement aligned with evolving NZISM controls, additional service offerings within the isolated realm (e.g., secure API gateways, automation pipelines), and growing the local partner network to support more PaaS and SaaS solutions on top of the certified IaaS layer.