Data Centre Regulations & UK Compliance Updates

Outreach cements commitment to EMEA with new data centre in Ireland

Outreach has opened a dedicated EU data centre in Dublin, Ireland, to support its EMEA customers go beyond GDPR requirements and meet stringent data residency requirements. This cements Outreach’s commitment towards helping its global customers adhere to tight privacy regulations. The new data centre helps Outreach achieve customers' data residency within the European Union. Hosted in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) regional data centre in Dublin, it stores customer-owned data associated with Outreach instances. These include prospects, accounts, organisations, and workflow data such as sequences, calls, and meetings contained within the EU infrastructure, all of which are processed using Outreach. Outreach EMEA customers who opt in to the new data centre will be able to use Outreach Engage, Outreach’s sales engagement platform that enables organisations to maximise prospecting productivity and continuously optimise their sales execution. With proven engagement workflows that turn insights into actions, Outreach Engage helps sellers make the best decisions to advance their deals across every moment of the sales cycle. Outreach plans to introduce additional features and services, including Outreach Insights reports, Outreach Commit and Outreach Guide, to its new data centre to optimise sales execution across its customer base in EMEA. This will enable salespeople all over EMEA to capitalise on sales automation and buyer sentiment to deliver tailored services to their prospects. “Our new data centre allows European sales leaders and their teams to drive growth with an intelligent system that meets the most rigorous data security and privacy requirements in the world,” said Manny Medina, chief executive officer and co-founder at Outreach. “Over the past two years, we opened our UK office and Prague innovation centre, and launched a series of EMEA-focused features, including support in 18 languages and multiple currencies, as well as local schedule-based sequence setup to allow for different work week configurations and holiday support. Our new data centre is the latest addition to our ongoing support for our European customers so they can capitalise on the full potential of our sales execution products and services.” Outreach is committed to meeting rigorous data security and data privacy requirements as supported by key independent third party certifications. The Outreach Sales Execution Platform already meets key requirements of the EU and UK GDPR. Outreach is also one of the first within its category to meet ISO 27701 data privacy certification to demonstrate compliance with GDPR and other data protection regulations. The additional provision of a data centre within the EU ensures that businesses operating in the EU that require data residency within the same geography as part of the security and privacy policies can do so using Outreach Engage.

Involta achieves HITRUST 2-year Certification

Involta has announced a total of six Involta data centres and managed infrastructure platforms have now earned certified status for information security by HITRUST. Facilities and systems in Boise, Idaho, Marion, Iowa, and Akron, Ohio, have joined three previously Involta certified locations, including:● Duluth, Minnesota● Tucson, Arizona● Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year (r2) Certified status demonstrates that these facilities and systems have met key regulations and industry-defined requirements and are appropriately managing risk. This achievement places Involta in an elite group of providers worldwide that have earned this certification. By including federal and state regulations, standards, and frameworks incorporating a risk-based approach, the HITRUST Assurance Program helps organisations address security and data protection challenges through a comprehensive and flexible framework of prescriptive and scalable security controls. “It is more important than ever to employ the most stringent security methods available for our compliant clouds and data centres and include technical and process elements such as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation),” comments Mark Cooley, VP of Security and Compliance, Involta. “We are pleased to demonstrate to our customers the highest standards for data protection and information security by achieving HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year Certification.” “In today’s ever-changing threat landscape, HITRUST is continually innovating to find new and creative approaches to address challenges,” says Jeremy Huval, Chief Innovation Officer, HITRUST. “Involta’s HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year Certification is evidence that they are at the forefront of industry best practices for information risk management and compliance.”

SmartZone G5 Security Handle offers secure dual authentication

Panduit has launched the SmartZone G5 Security Handle for ITE cabinets, which is designed to meet the most rigorous security challenges, both physical and digital, in today’s data centre environments. The multi-functional smart handle offers multiple configurations with and without a keypad to compliment users’ operational requirements. The integrated keypad version enables dual authentication by allowing for a card swipe and pin-code combination to access the cabinet. The G5 Security handle seamlessly mates with most data centre cabinets and has the capability to read both low frequency (125kHz) and high frequency (13.5MHz) cards. The handle has been designed to be current and future compliant with regulations required within this environment and is also GDPR ready, HIPAA ready and PCI-DSS ready to ensure that this design meets data centres and users’ cabinet security needs. It can support 200 authorised users and features an integral humidity sensor allowing humidity sensing to be optimally placed near the centre of the cabinet. The Status LED provides visual indication of the handle and security status. The Beacon LED is a visual indicator to provide status of the health of the cabinet at-a-glance. The beacon will flash yellow when the cabinet is in a minor alarm or flash red when the cabinet has a critical alarm. Users can use the beacon’s locate function to flash the beacon a defined colour to easily locate the cabinet when in a long run of cabinets. Expanding the capabilities of the Panduit SmartZone software, the G5 Security handle offers an integrated humidity sensor and specially designed environmental and door sensors. This allows data capture and consolidation which is utilised for real-time monitoring management and automated documentation.  The SmartZone G5 Security Handle connects directly to Panduit G5 iPDU and transmits real time information enabling control and management of cabinet access either directly through the on-board web interface or via SmartZone Cloud Software.

A new age of data centre security

This article was written by Amy Young, Sales Director at Custodian Data Centres on the new age of data centre security. The last two years have, in many cases, shown MSPs and their partners that the security protocols they had in place to protect their customers were less than robust. As you read this, the latest review of the 2018 Network and Information Systems (NIS) regulations is taking place. Initially designed to protect national data infrastructures, the regulations are proposed to expand their remit to include MSPs and their partners. According to the latest Global Threat 2022 Report from Crowdstrike, 62% of cybersecurity incidents detected were malware-free, illustrating a significant shift in attack vectors. However, ransomware continues to be a major component in malicious attacks, with PwC concluding that business leaders expect these attacks to increase by over 60% in 2022. However, it’s the expansion of the threat perimeter that will deliver the most challenges to CTOs as they re-imagine their enterprises within a post-pandemic business landscape. For them, choosing MSPs and their partners with security top of the agenda is imperative to include composable and mesh cybersecurity architectures. Named as the foundation of cybersecurity, data centres connect and integrate security services with their customers to create a holistic ecosystem that enterprises can use to secure every aspect of their business processes. This integration also ensures all remote workers have secure tools they can use with absolute confidence, providing consistent security and expertise. Cyberattack incident responses are also a critical component of every business’s contingency planning. A lesson learnt from the pandemic is that more resilience and strategic planning is needed to avoid or mitigate unforeseen incidents in the future. As enterprises switch permanently to mass remote working, the dispersed geography that now defines many business structures need the support of dynamic service organisations who have developed new secure event-driven architectures. Proactive security Robust and comprehensive digital security is based upon well-defined protocols. Enterprises must work with data partners not only accredited with ISO 27001 and PCI DSS facilities, but who also take security extremely seriously, in order to protect their business. These are the basis for secure, optimised and resilient organisations. Creating adaptive systems will have the twin advantage of meeting all the regulatory compliance and delivering on the ground practical cyberattack defences. MSPs are reliant on their data centres to rapidly evolve and adapt to provide these future-forward secure environments. As new threats are identified, their services expand, re-focus and implement automatic security protocols to protect users and their data. Securing your future The level and diversity of cyberattacks facing businesses of all sizes show little sign of abating. The Cybersecurity Breaches Survey from last year showed that two in five (39%) of companies reported a cybersecurity incident, with nearly a third (27%) being attacked weekly. The threats facing businesses today and those they will face in the future, require a dynamic approach to cybersecurity and physical security. Data centre services must have a dynamic and flexible solution available to meet the changing needs of their clients. Security systems must also be intelligent. The advent of AI (particularly machine learning) leads to a new breed of security services that can use massive datasets and offer business users predictive analytics to indicate potential security issues across their networks and infrastructure. These evolving services are particularly important as advanced persistent threats continue to rise. It is, however, vital to also place cyber security within the context of the physical environment it inhabits. To have a truly 360-degree view of the threat landscape an enterprise faces, physical assets must also be protected. Data centres that use CCTV, biometric identification, and state-of-the-art systems to suppress fire and flood are now an essential part of a comprehensive security strategy. In order to thrive post-pandemic, businesses need to be resilient and agile, this agility includes how they secure their assets and data. Optimised mission-critical data centres can deliver the comprehensive security enterprises and MSPs now demand in this ever-transforming digital landscape.