Hawke's Bay is ahead of other regions for installation of a multi-million dollar data storage centre, due to advanced fibre availability.
National company Virtual Infrastructure Professionals (VIP) has announced it will initially invest $250,000 over the next three months to provide local businesses with cloud hosting services.
VIP managing directorLance Warren said the initial data storage centre would be based at Unison's head offices in Hastings. The company was identifying sites for a permanent 2.5 tier or more data storage facility in Hawke's Bay.
He said that was on the back of UnisonFibre laying more than 140km of fibre optic cable.
"Fibre to businesses is well advanced in Hawke's Bay and one of the major benefits of fibre is cloud storage of data.
"Because of UnisonFibre's considerable investment and roll out of fibre, we have accelerated our plans and given Hawke's Bay higher priority and set up a highly secure data storage centre."
VIP planned to set up 17 data storage facilities throughout New Zealand. For increased security and storage ability, each site would be replicated across the data storage network.
He predicted the announcement of a data storage centre in the region would be a catalyst to attracting larger businesses and boost local businesses that had a national and/or international reach.
Cloud computing is a way of delivering IT services to users without the need to buy, install or manage any infrastructure. Businesses can have desktops, software, applications and services over a secure network. It is a flexible, enterprise IT environment on a "pay-as-you go" basis.
The cloud is simply a metaphor for the internet, based on the symbol used to represent the worldwide network in computer network diagrams.
VIP are at the UnisonFibre Business Expo for the next two days at the Pettigrew Green Arena at Taradale.
