ColoSpace

I am often asked about the types of certifications that ColoSpace maintains on its network of six data centers.  Our customers often host critical data that is subject to a host of internal and regulatory requirements.  The best report a data center can provide is a copy of its SAS70 Type II audit. 

Very simply SAS 70 (Type II) is an audit of one’s own procedures, in our case, the operation of a colocation and managed services provider, by an independent CPA firm, over a one year period of time, after which a report is issued to the client (ColoSpace, in this case) at the end of the year. Once completing the yearly report, the clock starts to begin all over, and a new audit is started by the same, or another firm.

 I personally think the costs are high, but also believe the benefits are worth the effort by both us and our customers. At ColoSpace, everyone participates in one way or another with the audit, and our customers are involved as well. We appreciate their help with updating and verifying our access lists and customer information every quarter. Customer employees do leave their jobs, and sometimes we are the last to know. Getting quarterly verification of employees with data center access, is a good reminder that we should be the first to know, rather than they other way around. We have the ability to immediately suspend access, if we or the employer feels it is necessary. 

We have weekly and monthly maintenance checks that need to be made to insure our electrical and cooling equipment, as well as emergency generator, access systems, surveillance equipment, and a number of other items are thoroughly checked to increase uptime performance. Having independent audits to insure these items are completed timely and correctly, is very important to me. It does seem like big brother watching our staff, but it is easy to skip some tasks when you get busy on other things. 

Another good result for our company, is that we standardized our facilities and procedures across all six data center locations. We found this to be costly at first, because each facility does have differences in equipment layout, types and sizes of various mechanical devices such as generators, UPS’s, AC systems, door access, etc., but we could standardize our security procedures, testing and maintenance schedules, and vendors. There is something good about finding good suppliers and vendors that treat you right, and are large enough to handle multiple locations and larger projects. 

With standardization of security cameras, for example, we can view all of our data centers at the same time from any location 24×7, allowing us better utilization of our security staff. 

We are also very fortunate to have our on staff of electrical and mechanical experts. They know our equipment, and can perform preventative maintenance daily, as well as fix them if they break – and do it any day or time that it happens.

We are proud of our staff, and I can recall a recent event, where a fire broke out in one of our redundant UPS’s, just before midnight on a Monday evening. Our on site tech responded to an alarm in the electrical room, and was pushed back by the toxic smelling smoke, and waited for the fire department. Before the fire department allowed us to re-enter the area to check out what happened and respond to any customer issues, six of our ColoSpace maintenance crew and techs were on site ready to perform whatever tasks were necessary. I had arrived on site myself to see them arrive, and wait to go into action. 

Fortunately, our remaining systems stayed in operation and we had a professional fire department that quickly isolated the damaged equipment, and did not need to press the EPO button. Through the SAS 70 audit procedures, they were prepared to enter our space, knew where our proper fire extinguishers were, knew where the clearly marked electric room was located, and we were able to monitor the activity of the firefighters for both ourselves and the command chief who were outside the building using our laptop computers.

I am very proud of our team, and we were able to redeploy a new UPS into the electric room, and remove the old one within 24 hours, without losing our redundant UPS. We know that events like this happen, no matter how much preventative maintenance is done, we just don’t know where or when they will happen.  I can rest pretty easy, knowing how great our ColoSpace staff is at responding to any customer service issue or potential disaster, like the one we experienced.

We certainly learned a lot from the SAS 70 certification process, and I hope you can see why it is important to find out if your present provider has passed their audit? For more information about our services, please send us a note.

ColoSpace has been helping our customers deploy cutting edge technical solutions for more than a decade, and today, in addition to providing hosting services to the financial services and healthcare industries support a number of cutting edge firms in the region.  We are relatively new to the blog-o-sphere, however – I think it’s something about the shoemaker’s kids running around barefoot… 

You will now be able to hear from several of our managers weekly through this blog as well as through Twitter.  Wayne, Dave, Phil and myself (Aaron) will be providing insight and updates into the things that we think are the most meaningful in the industry.

Today I would like to talk about the ability of social media to affect change.  A little outside of the hosting space but I’m in charge, so bear with me.  I recently returned from a month-long honeymoon – we took a trip across Southern Africa, visiting South Africa and Mozambique (and looking across the river at Zimbabwe). 

At one of the northern-most parts of South Africa’s Kruger National Park we stayed in the Pafuri Triangle, a 240 square kilometer park at the confluence of the Luvuvu and Limpopo rivers (as any lover of Kipling would be quite familiar).  The park is quite rural – we were far from mobile phone coverage, and many of the surrounding villages lacked potable water and reliable electricity.  

It was in Pafuri that I met Alweet, who had spent nearly all of his life living in the area.  He worked very hard, took correspondence classes, and became a certified ranger, and today earns a very comfortable living leading photo safari throughout his people’s land.  The pay is good, but the work is hard, and he is away from his family for six weeks at a time, living in tented camps along the Luvuvu river.  

The reason that Alweet’s story was so remarkable has been the way in which he uses Facebook to keep in touch with his family and friends, and also to promote an educational non-profit he is involved with.  Rather than relying on sporadic and expensive telephone service, Facebook has emerged as a much richer communication mechanism.  The sharing of pictures and video allows people to keep in touch in ways never imagined, and all of this can be done from an area that truly defines what it is to be rural.

 The Village Innovation Program has used Facebook and Social media to connect with hundreds of donors located throughout the world and has received donations ranging from money to books to other teacher’s supplies.  When they lost funding from a large International NGO, they decided to harness the power of social media to connect with people.  They are able to further that goal by exploiting each of their individual supporters’ networks, creating a viral effect that has resulted in the COO of an Internet Hosting firm in New England supporting the construction of a library in the Makuleke Village, ten thousand miles away. 

We look forward to enhancing the communication that takes place between our leaders and our customers, employees, and friends.  If you have any suggestions or comments about that way in which we use social media, please do not hesitate to contact us & let us know!

Welcome to the official company blog for ColoSpace.com, where we talk about our company, our industry, and of course, why you should use ColoSpace for your colocation needs .We are excited to add a blog to our site. Please follow us regularly, you’ll never know what we’ll come up with! Our goal is to inform you of everything we know. Please join along, comment when necessary and always ask questions as needed.