Taking charge of the heart of the business and delegating technology and connectivity is a phenomenon that has been on the rise in Uruguayan companies for the last five years or so. Until recently, it was usual for companies themselves to set up the specific infrastructure to host their servers with all the critical and indispensable business information, the software used and everything related to technology. This meant employing trained personnel to operate their data centres, and complying with physical and IT security requirements.
With the exception of technology companies - which have the know-how to run their own IT systems - companies in more traditional industries that use technology as a tool and not as the basis of their operations saw the costs of running their own data centres as high.
The emergence of cloud computing or cloud services, which do not require too much physical space to operate, together with the first cloud services developed by Google and Microsoft in 2009, allowed any person or company to host information in this way and at a relatively low cost. Although this phenomenon opens the doors to world-class clients, it is Uruguayan clients who contribute to the growth of the data centre business, as they need to back up part of their data locally, due to their proximity in the event of a problem or due to regulations that require data to be kept on national territory.
For this reason, and following the lead of some pioneering multinationals, local companies began to delegate the care of their data to experts who meet the necessary security requirements. Data centres began to boom with the advent of the internet. Before, having servers outside the office had high connection costs," recalled Netgate 's director and president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (CUTI), Álvaro Lamé. Netgate leases space in ANTEL' s data centre and has its own.
Technology and communication companies are beneficiaries of this "cloud boom", since according to Lamé, what started as a space for internal use has become a business opportunity to sell their services to companies, in what for him resembles a "real estate business": "The company rents meters in a place to deposit the information; it is almost a car park of servers where the digital assets of the companies are located".
The exact number of data centres installed in Uruguay is unknown, as most technology companies have one, which may be for internal use or to sell services to third parties. The largest in terms of physical capacity are ANTEL's in Pando, Geocom and Zonamerica.
No matter the space
Physical and virtual are the basis of today's data centres. IBM Uruguay Services Sales Manager Marcel Kuza said that companies care about service and it is not essential to know the exact physical location of the data centre. "Companies are going to adopt processing where one data centre is anywhere in the world, and another is going to be in a local data centre," he said. That combination of processing in two different sites, one more user-controlled and one more global, is called "hybrid cloud".
The cloud model provides flexibility and is framed within what is known as Software as a Service. This means that, depending on the time of year or the amount of information the company needs to process, it is possible to go from 10 servers to 50 from one day to the next, without modifying each computer in the company. This makes the contracts between the company and whoever operates its data, flexible, being able to choose between daily, weekly or monthly.
One of IBM's customers is Datalogic, which works with SoftLayer's cloud services for electronic invoicing and payroll receipts for some local companies. Datalogic director Gustavo Charbonnier explained that the flexibility of the cloud allows, for example, finance companies that are covered by Central Bank regulations to choose to make certain information available in a local data centre, and other information in another centre in any country.
"When it is detected that there will be peak workloads, we request that they put more server capacity online, and when the peak workload is over, it goes down. The only way to do that is with cloud services," Charbonier said.
Regarding the use of cloud services locally and globally, the co-founder of the Montevideo Com data centre, Victor Villar, which has been offering cloud services since 2008, explained that the choice depends on the scope of the application or programme to be used. "If it is only going to be used in Uruguay, the most reasonable thing to do is to host it locally; if you want to be global or there are branches of the company in different countries, it is necessary to use public or global clouds," he said. Among the latter, Amazon or Google services are some of the most requested.
Although this model sounds attractive and globally used by large corporations, in Latin America the process has been slower. Latechco provides technology services based on its three data centres: two free trade zones (World Trade Center Free Zone and Aguada Park), and, under a different name, a year ago it opened a data centre for Uruguayan clients in World Trade Center Torre 4. Latechco's manager, Maximiliano Pedemonte, identified the logic followed by certain regional companies: "Large companies were first very reluctant to take their equipment out of the companies; when they took it out they wanted to go to a place where they knew where it was. This is where local data centres come into the model, which give the business owner peace of mind, knowing that security standards are being met.
Security is everything
Several Uruguayan data centres have the backing of the US Uptime Institute, which provides certification in four Tier classifications - from I to IV - to evaluate data centre infrastructure in design, construction and operation.
"The fact that it is certified gives the customer confidence," says Geocom general manager Abel Dias, whose data centre, like Zonamerica's, is Tier III in design. This means that all the data centre's support services are duplicated: double power generator, double UPS, double air conditioning. This type of data centre also has multiple internet and telephony providers.
Zonamerica's technology manager, Gabriel Szlaifsztein, said that the international companies that use the data centre have global audits that require certification: "In today's world, all information is digitised and ultimately the data centre is the place where the organisation's information is stored. Zonamerica's data centre is used by customers in the park and companies abroad.
Logicalis operations manager Leonardo Malvar, who provides data centre infrastructure solutions, said the certification "is the letter of introduction, which backs up how the company's information is taken care of".
Infrastructure must have contingency, that is one of the fundamental requirements. Geocom's Dias stressed that there must be an assurance that "if something happens in your company, the servers in the data centre will continue to work for your company".
"The door that Antel opened
Latecho's manager, Maximiliano Pedemonte, said that the ANTEL data centre recently opened in Pando, "opened the door for foreign companies to know that Uruguay has cutting-edge technology. They turn on their radar and look for the data centre options available in the country". This data centre is the largest in Uruguay. Divided into four rooms, it has a total of 1,000 racks (metal supports that house servers).
For his part, the general manager of ANTEL, Javier Emicuri, said that the idea of building this data centre "arose in the framework of the ecosystem that the company has been forming", framed in the optical fibre to homes and the submarine cable with the USA.
ANTEL's data centre has clients such as Google, Facebook and Netflix, which have already contracted space on its servers. Emicuri confirmed that both large, medium and small companies will have their place, due to the flexibility of contracts according to the needs of each one.
"Economies of scale can be achieved by outsourcing data centre infrastructure". Javier Emicuri, general manager of ANTEL
The keys
- Security: The data centre must comply with conditions that ensure contingency and continuity of service.
- Environment: Uruguay is an ideal country for companies to store their data, according to experts. There is no terrorism, no natural disasters (earthquakes that could bring down data centres) and political security.
- Contracts: The flexibility of contracts, using the cloud services the company needs, lowers costs for companies.
Source: The Observer
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