Managed hosting firm CentriLogic Inc. has launched its U.S.-based infrastructure-as-a-service offering which, coupled with its Canadian data centre operations, will allow its clients to “enable geopolitical delineation of data resources.”
The Toronto-based company said this will alleviate some of the regulatory and compliance issues some North American organizations experience when trying to collect data and deliver services to both U.S. and Canadian customers. CentriLogic’s suite of services include collocation, private and managed hosting, data management, security and network services.
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Jim Latimer, vice-president of CentriLogic, said that while financial institutions have traditionally been worried about this issue, any company that collects data from its customers in both countries should be interested.
“We realize there are other multi-country (cloud service providers), but we focus on it as a core strength,” he said.
In addition to announcing the new service, the company announced that Toronto-based Cookie Jar Entertainment Inc. has successfully completed its initial pilot with CentriLogic and will become the first customer to utilize the U.S.-based IaaS offering.
The children’s entertainment firm, which moved its external-facing properties to CentriLogic’s U.S.-based cloud servers, should improve its Web site performance for U.S.-based Web visitors as well as give the company a more flexible and scalable environment for future endeavours.
“As far as collecting customer data, it will give us the flexibility to do that in the future,” said Mike Haas, director of IT for Cookie Jar.
The move will also boost Cookie Jar’s security, as all of its outward facing servers will be on the same network, as opposed to scattered around at different facilities with multiple vendors, Haas said. He added that his company would have had to keep expanding and adding more sites and systems to house its growing Web content on physical infrastructure.
Cookie Jar’s library of children’s shows include Caillou, Inspector Gadget, Arthur and The Doodlebops.
For companies looking to follow a similar route as Cookie Jar, Latimer recommended IT shops ask a lot of questions to potential cloud services vendors before signing any contracts.
“You need to ask about the infrastructure itself, where the cloud will be located geographically, where your data is, where you applications will run, and also, where do the areas of responsibility extend to the provider,” he said.
For some customers, Latimer said, being local to their data is the most important aspect of the hosting agreement.
CentriLogic operates data centre facilities in Southern Ontario and Western New York.