Digicel IT technicians at the new datacentre. Photo courtesy Digicel.
Data security and storage is uppermost on the minds in this technological age. Many don’t realize the intricacies of ensuring that their personal and business information are kept secure and readily available for their use. Telecommunications company, Digicel, takes their responsibility in providing sate of the art technology and security for its customers in this regard.
With its state of the art designs and placing major emphasis on Business continuity, disaster recovery, data and server backup and real-time replication, Digicel is currently completing its new Tier III complaint data centre which will have an overall capacity of 200 racks, making it the largest data centre in Trinidad & Tobago and one of the largest in the Caribbean.
The Data Centre will support SSAE SOC Type II and ISO27001 certification which focuses on the business processes and the security of the customer’s data. ISO/IEC 27001 is the best-known standard compared to the others and provides requirements for an information security management system (ISMS). Through the use of ISMS, a systematic approach to managing sensitive company information so that it remains secure, Digicel will be able to include people, processes and IT systems by applying a risk management process thus helping small, medium and large businesses in any sector keep information assets secure.
When launched, the data centre will be concurrently maintainable, providing 99.982% availability and requires no shutdowns for equipment replacement and maintenance. A redundant delivery path for power and cooling will be added to the redundant critical components of Tier II so that each and every component needed to support the IT processing environment can be shut down and maintained without impact on the IT operation.
Digicel’s data centre is also set to offer a full range of Cloud & Managed services including Off-site Data Storage which can be backed-up on island (providing data sovereignty) or in one of their other data centres across the Caribbean or a combination of both. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has been growing at a fast rate and with the Caribbean wide high capacity MPLS network Digicel will provide diverse, low latency connectivity off-island and replicate your infrastructure and data across their data centre locations.
It is important to note that cloud services become redundant if there is no reliable connectivity to the platform however with Digicel being the only Internet Service Provider (ISP) with a fully dedicated business Metro Fibre-optic network, the issue will be addressed emphatically.
Other services to be offered will include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Virtual Desktop Integration (VDI), BYOD, MS Office 365 and Managed Security. With Digicel’s strong relationships with world-class vendors and partners, they will have a practical ability to build and support best-of-breed solutions for clients.
It is highly understood that companies want to maintain control of their Information and Communication Technologies while taking full advantage of the state of the art technology, scalability, security, and availability that third party datacentres provide. In turn, this gives businesses the scope to focus on their core business operations. If a system becomes unavailable, company operations may be impaired or stopped completely. It is essential to provide a reliable infrastructure for IT operations so that any chance of disruption will be minimized.
