Remote pumping stations, unmanned substations and mine-site control rooms increasingly depend on cloud-hosted compute. But moving data to and from that compute has usually meant crossing the public internet, a compromise that critical infrastructure operators have long been uncomfortable with.
Digital infrastructure provider Vocus has introduced a new solution; an end-to-end private path that connects a remote Starlink terminal directly to cloud compute hosted in an Australian data centre, without traffic travelling over the internet at any point.
A water utility’s remote telemetry can reach a Sydney data centre over a satellite link that behaves with many of the same characteristics as dedicated fibre.
“No virtual private networks. No public IP addresses. No VPN tunnelling,” said Vocus Satellite Development Manager Ashley Grove.
The VPN question
For two decades, Grove said, the working assumption in remote operations has been that a VPN over the public internet is good enough.
“The issue is that there’s still a public IP surface somewhere in the network,” he said. “And there’s growing concern the encryption techniques used to protect that traffic today will be broken quickly once quantum computing arrives.”
According to Vocus, Australian government guidance on post-quantum cryptography is already pressing critical infrastructure operators to plan a migration away from encryption that quantum computers may eventually break.
Another related pressure is the convergence of IT and operational technology traffic. When corporate and industrial control data are sharing the same network, keeping data off the internet becomes a baseline requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Removing the public internet altogether sidesteps the problem, delivers the latency critical workloads need, and strips out VPN overhead.
How it works
The solution combines three Vocus products. Starlink Ethernet Access hands satellite traffic into Vocus peering points in Sydney and Perth as dedicated Ethernet, not public internet.
The Vocus IP WAN carries data across a national private backbone to Vocus Private Cloud in Australian data centres. Traffic can also reach public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without hitting the internet.
Amazon LEO has signalled private cloud interconnect as a key feature when operational. Vocus delivers that capability today over Starlink and will extend to Amazon LEO once enterprise ready.
Beyond the on-site historian
For decades, mining and utility operators have run local ‘historian’ servers, on-site systems capturing time-stamped sensor data from programmable logic controllers. The historian was insurance as much as analytics, keeping operations running through wide area network outages.
With a private satellite-to-cloud path performing reliably from remote sites, that dependency loosens. Operators can shrink the local footprint, move analytics to central or cloud compute, or use on-site kit for edge processing rather than connectivity insurance.
Why integration matters
For utilities weighing a substantial integration project against a turnkey contract, the calculation is straightforward. As intelligence moves to pipelines, pumping stations and solar farms, simplification matters more.
“A CIO could take Starlink Ethernet Access, add a managed SD-WAN appliance, contract a private cloud provider and integrate the lot,” Grove said.
“Or they can take a pre-validated service from one carrier that engineers the whole chain and takes responsibility end-to-end.”
What comes next
As artificial intelligence inferencing moves closer to where data is generated and industrial IoT sensor counts climb, operators are looking at ‘private cloud at the edge’: local compute for latency-sensitive workloads, with secure backhaul to centralised systems.
“We’re not selling satellite. We’re not selling cloud. We’re selling a private network that happens to reach anywhere in Australia, all the way from the remote location to an Australian data center – and then on to a hyperscaler cloud, if necessary, all without ever touching the internet.”
For more information, visit www.vocus.com.au
This article appears in the May/June 2026 edition of Utility. Subscribe HERE.