Raya Data Center, the leading collocation and data center solution provider in Egypt, announced Tuesday that it has successfully achieved the ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) certification, thereby becoming the first data centre in Egypt to achieve this standard. This achievement comes as Raya Data Center gears up to launch its public cloud service offering by the end of Q1 2016. The ISO 22301 standard specifies the requirements for a management system to protect against, reduce the likelihood of, and ensure a business recovers from disruptive incidents. This achievement comes as number four on the list of ISO certifications achieved by Raya Data Center over the past 4 years which includes ISO 27001, ISO 20000, and ISO 9001. On how the BCMS certification is relevant in the context of the new cloud service offering that Raya Data Center will launch soon, Seham Mohammed, Security and Business Continuity Senior Manager at Raya Data Center noted that "designing for failure is not a luxury anymore. In traditional IT architectures, reliability is often seen in terms of uptime and can normally be planned and anticipated without major hiccups or surprises. In a cloud environment, the rules are different. There's a lot more complexity involved. Demand on services is usually unpredictable and there is usually interdependency between systems and resources that could be outside the control of the cloud service provider. All this translates into more pressure and complexity, requiring more stringent measures to achieve maximum visibility of business risks both externally and internally & reduce the impact and frequency of business disruptions. This is exactly what the ISO 22301 BCMS standard helps us attain as we prepare for our public cloud service launch". The ISO 22301 BCMS certification recognizes Raya Data Center's preparedness and ability to respond to disasters and drive business continuity. It also provides confidence in the organization's recovery plans and ensures appropriate and agile contingencies. Over the past couple of years, Raya Data center has been expanding its ICT infrastructure by commissioning a new data center in New Cairo back in 2014, upgrading its technology platform, and creating more connectivity and power redundancy across all sites. Raya Data Center operates a total of three state-of-the-art facilities distributed strategically across greater Cairo in the 6 of October city, Maadi, and New Cairo. Raya Data Center's public cloud offering will cover a wide spectrum of services including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), in addition to cloud management and security services. The new cloud platform promises customers in Egypt a world-class model of public cloud service delivery that brings along the benefits of automation, instantaneous service provisioning, and flexibility of self-service, all combined with a robust support program that ensures sustained reliability and availability of clients' IT assets. The new service also promises flexible pricing and payment models that suit the varying needs of small, medium, and large organizations.
