Interoute Offers Virtual Hosting

LONDON -- British authorities recently uncovered a terrorist plot to take out key Internet nodes in London*. In response to this and other growing threats such as climate change-driven natural disasters – Interoute has launched a new Virtual Hosting Platform. As Europe’s largest network, Interoute uniquely provides a Geographic Failover capability to ensure that companies’ valuable business systems will keep working even if a disruption occurs in one location.

Modern networks are vital to most businesses – not just ecommerce giants like Amazon, ebay or youtube, but also for all companies that use their IT systems as the backbone of their business activities. The failure of the infrastructure could quickly result in major revenue losses. The international consulting group Gartner estimates that the cost of IT downtime can run as high as €33,280 per hour**. For the rapidly growing mid-sized enterprise market in Europe, the resulting loss of business could run into Billions of Euros.

In the face of such a threat, Geographic Failover has been the most reliable way of safeguarding a company. But with the traditional Dedicated Hosting model, where companies have to essentially re-create physical back-ups in each location, this solution has generally been too costly for most enterprises. Thanks to Virtual Hosting, this important feature for business critical systems is now an affordable choice. If disaster strikes, the virtually hosted applications can very quickly be restarted on an alternative machine in a different location on Interoute’s next-generation network.

Secure and resilient for mission critical applications

The Virtual Hosting platform in each location is fully redundant, offering high availability backed by strict SLA’s. The functionality is very similar to managed hosting on a dedicated machine, and allows customers a choice of operating systems with full access to install applications. Instead of buying or leasing servers for multiple years, companies can deploy Virtual Hosting solutions for as briefly as a few months, allowing customers increased flexibility. Furthermore, the customers do not have to worry about hardware costs and delivery times: the virtual machines are housed in servers that are already in place in Interoute’s data centres, ready to handle companies’ data needs. Indeed, a solution can be ready in as little as a single working day, following receipt of order.Interoute currently operates 7 data centres throughout Europe -- Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Madrid, Munich, Paris and London -- all connected via the Continent’s most advanced next-generation voice and data network. With Virtual Hosting platforms located in multiple data centres, Interoute can offer Geographic Failover for mission critical applications. If and when disaster strikes in one city or geographic region, Interoute immediately switches virtual servers to a different data centre in a different geographical location.

The data centres provide the highest infrastructure reliability and security in the industry, featuring seven layers of security, dual power feeds, backup generators and continuous monitoring. In addition, Virtual Hosting customers benefit from a virtual machine that’s always up-to-date with the latest hardware without having to pay for expensive upgrades on their own machines.

The Virtual Hosting platform also helps companies address the everyday “crises” posed by traffic surges. For example, successful marketing campaigns can overwhelm even generally stable websites; airport closures and flight delays can do the same for the online businesses of airlines, agencies, etc. And almost every manufacturer has experienced business-damaging delays due to a slowdown in network performance during peak usage times. The Virtual Hosting platform can accommodate those crunch times, without companies having to worry about additional CPU power or hardware. The Virtual Hosting platform allows Interoute to quickly add additional memory or processing power to a virtual server to help the site cope with the increased demand.

”In today’s business world, protecting your data is critical to survival,” says Gareth Williams Interoute’s President of Global Markets. “Interoute’s Virtual hosting platform makes this an economically viable option for companies that thought this level of protection was beyond their reach. It builds on the years of experience we gained managing business critical Dedicated Hosting solutions and is also an ideal solution for customers needing to react to the unpredictable nature of conducting business online in an online world.”

Interoute Telecommunications Ltd.0