Scalable and secure internet connectivity is now mission-critical as enterprises re-architect their business models and migrate to hybrid cloud infrastructures. To help our customers take on this challenge, DataBank partners with the leading global carriers, including Arelion (formerly Telia Carrier). Throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, Arelion provides IP transit services, cloud connectors, and dense wavelength division multiplexing to increase the bandwidth of fiber networks.
For DataBank customers, Arelion currently provides services within six of our markets—Cleveland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City. We also work in tandem in other markets and we are looking to connect more facilities in the future as customer demand guides our ongoing expansion of this partnership.
“Our partnership with Arelion is driven by their continual investments in major U.S. cities and key edge markets,” says Michael Ward, director of network architecture for DataBank. “This helps drive connectivity and network diversity while also providing enterprises with more scalability options and additional connectivity choices.”
Top-Ranked Global Backbone
With more than 2,000 customers worldwide, the Arelion private Cloud Connect service links directly to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Arelion IP transit services—featuring one of the world’s leading global IP backbones—ensure reliability and uptime for direct routes between content and end-users.
“Currently, our customer base accounts for 65% of all internet routes,” says Art Kazmierczak, Arelion director of business & network development. “Our Tier 1 peering ecosystem provides dedicated, high-capacity transport to carry high volumes of traffic across long-haul stretches with direct connectivity that enhances user experiences throughout more than 125 countries.”
Through DataBank’s partnership with Arelion, customers also enjoy direct access to a unique ecosystem of more than 700 networks, content, and cloud application service providers. These systems feature high-quality connectivity and low latency for optimal end-user experiences.
Strong Protection Against DDoS Attacks
With security, a key concern among enterprise customers, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation is crucial to maintain business continuity. Arelion takes on this challenge within its global IP backbone.
The platform proactively manages terabit-scale attacks before they cause service disruption at customer aggregation points. With Arelion’s simplified architecture, automatic mitigation, multi-homed coverage, and detailed analytics, customers can be confident their applications are well-protected.
Real-Time Provisioning to Improve Connectivity Experiences
For private cloud connectivity needs, DataBank customers can connect with Arelion to leverage the same scalable network infrastructure trusted by large public cloud providers. They also can quickly configure private bandwidth links connecting global data centers and cloud instances.
“DataBank’s partnership with Arelion also enables us to deliver in locations where they provide services as cloud on-ramps,” said Ward. That current list of locations includes:
DFW1
DFW2
DFW3, as an extended cross-connect
SLC1 and the SLC Campus
IND1
IND2
PHL1
CLE1
PIT1
PIT2, as an extended cross-connect
“We also use an open optical layer that allows customers to provision equipment from multiple vendors,” Kazmierczak explains. “This accelerates core backbone expansions and maintains expected delivery intervals. It also solves delivery challenges associated with supply chain dependence on private fixed transport networks.”
“Arelion’s network services greatly benefit any company looking to improve user connectivity experiences,” adds Ward. “They facilitate business operations through fast delivery intervals and transparency—along with secure, automated self-serve capability. This is all achievable through the Arelion portal and APIs, which enable real-time service provisioning and reporting.”
For more information on how your company can take advantage of Arelion connectivity services, contact your DataBank account manager or visit www.databank.com. You can also find out more at the Arelion website—www.arelion.com.
After extensive planning and a lot of effort, we are excited to officially unveil DataBank’s brand-new website.
Interested in learning more and how this new site can improve your experience as a DataBank customer, partner, or prospect? In this article, we’ll give you a quick tour of some of the biggest changes and important new resources that may be helpful to you.
Website Themes
As we developed the overall strategy for the new website, we wanted to make sure it addressed a few important themes. This would be critical to helping any visitor get exactly what you need out of the new site.
These themes include:
Data Center Footprint: The new site now does more to communicate the total scope and scale of our data center footprint. DataBank now has more data centers in more U.S. metros than any other provider, public or private. Now, anyone visiting the site can quickly see exactly where our data centers are and learn more about each one.
Edge Focus: The new site also communicates new details about DataBank’s edge strategy. This is important for companies looking to make the best decisions possible to move data, applications, and workloads as close as possible to end users.
Customer Portal: Our software-driven infrastructure management capabilities are available in the DataBank Customer Portal, now more prominently displayed. Customers use this to manage all aspects of their IT infrastructure.
Hybrid IT Solutions: DataBank provides a flexible, customer-centric approach to hybrid IT, and the website’s Solutions page highlights the many options customers have to easily build, scale, and adapt a hybrid IT infrastructure that truly works for them.
DataBank Employees and Culture: We also wanted to shine a light on our employees—not just our data centers or technology—because our talent, diversity, and culture all give us our most durable competitive advantage. To this end, we expanded the Culture section of the website to emphasize our exceptional people.
Thought Leadership Content: Technical and Executive professionals can stay current about the industry through DataBank blogs, case studies, webinars, podcasts, and white papers. You can browse or search for relevant topics in the Resources section.
By focusing on these themes and making them as prominent as possible on the new site, we hope to help any visitor quickly find exactly what you’re looking for as well as understand the wide range of solutions and services DataBank offers.
New Content and Functionality
The new website also features many new design elements, including content and functionality updates that support the themes described above. For example, both the home page and the main data center page feature an interactive map that conveys the scope of DataBank’s footprint and the populations we reach at a glance. The map allows visitors to toggle various features available in each metro—such as cloud nodes, carrier hotels, and 100% renewable power—for a highly relevant experience.
The new site also includes maps of each metro to show exactly where our data centers are located relative to each other as well as to major highways in the metro. It also shows our nine (so far) specific campuses where our data centers have room to expand. The website provides diagrams of each campus that highlight current facilities and potential future expansion space.
As part of the site re-design, we created specific sub-pages in the data center section that expand on our Edge strategy and our approach to data center design.
Let Us Know What You Think
Our refreshed website was designed with DataBank customers and other visitors in mind.
We’re not done yet. We will continue to evolve and make new updates, so please let us know what you think about the new site. If you have any feedback or suggestions to make the DataBank website even better, please let us know.
DataBank’s 2022 food drive, managed by the newly formed CultureCorps, took place in late June and early July. Food banks nationwide report their lowest donation levels in the summer, meaning the DataBank drive had a great impact in helping people in need. We want to share some of the results of that effort.
Collection Sites for Canned Goods
More than 20 data centers in 12 metros set up collection sites including Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Austin, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and others. Employees, customers, and even family members participated in the food drive.
With so much interest, many sites kept their donation bins up an extra week and, ultimately, all the participation and awareness generated from the food drive resulted in over 1,000 pounds of donated canned goods that were delivered to various local food banks.
Other Ways DataBankers Participated
For staff members who could not get to a data center collection point physically, DataBank set up an option to donate via Amazon and have those goods delivered to the DFW1 data center. These Amazon donations accounted for almost half the 408 pounds of food collected in DFW1 alone.
Some DataBankers chose to participate in other ways, including a group of nearly a dozen Denver area staff members who used the company’s Volunteer Time-Off (VTO) program to work at Food Bank of the Rockies, preparing meals for underprivileged kids who are provided free breakfast and lunch.
Check out our slide show to get a closer look at this successful volunteer effort, and get ready for our next volunteer program later this year.
In this second article in an ongoing series, we continue to present the DataBank Customer Portal and how it provides real-time visibility and self-service control. This article highlights the portal’s capabilities for managing physical access. Stay tuned for additional articles, or learn more about the DataBank Customer Portal now.
The security of your colocation environment is one of the principal responsibilities in our partnership with you. There’s no need to submit a service ticket and wait on a response — it all happens instantly. Having said that, if you’d prefer we make changes to your or your users’ badges and Portal users for you, we’re happy to do so – simply open a ticket requesting a change and we’re always here to help. When building a portal to enable real-time visibility and access control, you spoke, and we listened. With our latest update, we’ve now enabled over 57 data center locations with the features our customers requested most:
Define which users have permissions to grant access
Review my list of badge holders and what they may access
Request a new badge for a user with predefined access rights and have it ready upon arrival
Alter, grant, and revoke access to specific locations in real-time
Disable and enable users at your convenience
Create both permanent and temporary badges for contractors
Review and download your logs and compliance reports in real-time to review successful and failed attempts access attempts
For an overview of these features, please review our how-to videos
Define which users have permissions to grant access
To manage your users and their roles, the Customer Portal provides three default roles: administrator, billing, and support. You also have the option to create custom roles.
Administrators are the only people who can manage users (add, edit, delete profiles and roles) and they can authorize orders, including new services and changes to existing services. The Customer Portal makes it possible for administrators to limit what users can see by tagging them to a specific service, so that when users log in all they see is information specific to that service. Other helpful options include two-factor authentication, which can be applied to all users or specific users, such as those who travel frequently.
Administrators also control the password expiration cadence—ranging from never (which we strongly advise against) to every 30, 60, 90, or 180 days. The Customer Portal will allow you to adopt any password expiration cadence you require.
Physical Access Administrators can grant and remove permanent access in real time for your badge holders.
Temporary Access Administrators can grant temporary access in real time. Each of these require both a start date and end date.
Users assigned to Billing roles can view billing data, make payments, and change the organization’s billing address.
Support users can review services, pull reports regarding services, and create service tickets and view the status of incidents.
Additionally, Custom roles can be created to specify exactly what information and processes a given user may engage in the Portal.
To change and apply roles to a user, head over to the Managed Users section of our Customer Portal. Click the Pencil next to the user to edit the records, and click on the permissions tab.
Ensuring Proper Access to Your Environment
Your account users are the only people in your company who are authorized to communicate with DataBank and receive Customer Portal notifications about your colocation services, billing, and support. The profiles you create will dictate which notifications (i.e., invoices, patching, system maintenance, support tickets) they receive and which information DataBank will discuss. You can be as specific as you like to determine exactly what users in your company can see and what they can control.
Our preference is for users to submit service and support requests through the Customer Portal so the user is automatically authenticated and we can immediately respond. However, if an authorized user on the account calls DataBank, we validate that person through our authentication process. We then look at which rights the user has, and our support team will explain what that person can discuss based on his or her role. If the user wants to talk about something outside of the user’s profile rights, we check with your organization’s administrator contact(s) for permission to maintain the security of your environment.
Review My List of Badge Holders to See What They Can Access
One of the most common questions we fields is to provide a list of badge access holders and a list of what they can access. This information is now available to you 24×7 in the card holder access list. Click the pencil to review which badge readers a user can access.
Request a New Badge for a User with Pre-Defined Access Rights and Have It Available Upon The User’s Arrival
The Physical Access section of the Customer Portal integrates with badge readers at our data centers, applying changes in real time to ensure only employees and vendors you’ve authorized can access your infrastructure. To activate Permanent or Temporary access for a user, click on the Active Access link in our Customer Portal, then complete the form, A badge will be waiting for pickup at the selected location and will be provided after identity verification. You will be able to grant access only to the locations to which you have access.
Need to change and deny access quickly? Do so in real time or at a scheduled date via the Customer Portal.
Alter, Grant, and Revoke Access to Specific Locations in Real Time
Do you have multiple cages, suites, and locations? Manage physical access permissions on one screen across all of your locations. In addition, customers who have vendors visiting the data center periodically for system maintenance but don’t require permanent access can toggle vendor badges on and off. You control access at all times.
Review and Download Your logs and Compliance Reports in Real Time to See Successful and Failed Access Attempts
Another important feature is the ability to pull logs of who has visited your data centers and see exactly what each person accessed. Our customers appreciate the ability to export monthly log reports to demonstrate controlled access to regulatory assessors and auditors. The log reports also show the history of activating and deactivating badge access.
Proving Compliance and Security to Key Stakeholders
The list of users to which you grant physical and digital access — and the history logs showing when they access the physical environment and the Customer Portal — will play a vital role in your compliance efforts. Whether it’s for HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, or another regulation, you can export reports of all user activities for assessors to validate.
This information is also helpful in demonstrating your deployed security measures to your financial partners, investors, company executives, and board of directors. In today’s cybersecurity-conscious world, all these stakeholders are keenly interested in the physical and digital control you have over your colocation environment, and the DataBank Customer Portal can be a key tool in meeting their requirements.
Ultimately, the DataBank Customer Portal is yours, not ours. Its features are driven by our customers’ feedback, and updates meeting those requirements are rolled out as quickly as possibly by our in-house development team. We’re committed to ensuring the Customer Portal meets your needs and provides the best possible experience, facilitating user access based on your requirements.
