Skip to main content

Customers and vendors celebrate completion of Rogers Tier III GTA data centre

@rogers
6 hours ago

Customers and vendors celebrate completion of Rogers Tier III GTA data centre

Now, more customers can take advantage of colocation and cloud services from Rogers to increase efficiencies, save on costs and innovate for their businesses.

 

September 12 marked the opening of the final phase of the Uptime Institute-certified Tier III Rogers data centre in the Greater Toronto Area. The completion of this fourth and final pod, spanning an extra 7,500 square feet of available space, provides more businesses with the opportunity to take advantage of state-of-the-art colocation, private cloud, and virtual private cloud services that can transform businesses in terms of cost savings and operational efficiencies minus the challenges of running your own data centre.

Held at the Edward Hotel in Markham and hosted by Philippe Oille, VP Enterprise, Ontario, as well as Tom Jolly, VP Data Centre and Cloud Solutions, and Jennifer Trainor Beam, Director, Data Centre & Cloud Sales, the event—attended by more than 65 Rogers personnel, customers and vendors—began with a delicious and lively mix-and-mingle buffet lunch followed by an informative panel featuring Michael Ustal, Canadian President, Dimension Data, and Vin Singh, VP of IT, Circle of Care.

Three men on a stages speaking to people

“We were spending too much time on system maintenance and incident management,” says Singh, whose organization is a leading not-for-profit home care provider. “With the private cloud solution Rogers presented to us, we were able to offload those mundane tasks and focus on developing our own proprietary software platform, which we use not only to supply and manage our services, but also to raise funds by selling access to it for other health care providers to use. Now, our costs are more predictable and we’re not spending as much capital on server refreshes. We also maintained our HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] compliance, which is a must in our industry, despite changing our IT architecture.”

“Too many businesses are still unnecessarily apprehensive about migrating their infrastructure into a data centre or the cloud,” says Oille. “Managing your own network infrastructure on your own premises can be very challenging, especially for businesses in the mid-market who don’t necessarily have enough expertise in-house to optimize those operations. This means they often have to sacrifice innovation by restricting the resources they do have to maintenance tasks. Moving their servers into a secure, fully staffed facility like ours or converting some of that hardware into virtualized versions in the cloud would free up their IT resources, increase their agility and save them capital. And yet, many of them still have security and compliance concerns that, in facilities like ours and with the services we offer, are really unfounded these days.”

“Too many businesses are still unnecessarily apprehensive about migrating their infrastructure into a data centre or the cloud.”

Moderated by Tom Jolly, the panel covered the benefits of proximity to your cloud provider and the importance of proper onboarding for a smooth journey to the cloud. “What I hope our audience takes away from the panel is how, while global cloud service providers are large, they aren’t necessarily the best choice for your business, particularly with regard to data sovereignty and jurisdictions” says Jolly. “We also want to dispel the belief that hyperscalers offer the smoothest transition to the cloud when it’s really the smaller providers that offer a more white-glove experience, ensuring you get the solution that’s right for your business.”

After a ribbon-cutting ceremony commemorating the official opening of the final pod, guests were taken on a complete tour of the data centre. “Giving these tours to our vendors and customers is important,” says Peter Konecny, Director, Data Centre Operations. “We really get to showcase firsthand that Rogers is a leader in the data centre and cloud space in Canada. It’s a great way to demonstrate our expertise and spread the word.”

“…it’s really the smaller providers that offer a more white-glove experience, ensuring you get the solution that’s right for your business.”

After the tour, guests returned to the Edward for libations, hors d'oeuvres and a raffle giveaway with prizes that included gift cards, Toronto Blue Jays tickets, two iPhone 8s and two 50-inch 4K TVs. Overall, the day was a rousing success. “Events like this express how much we really appreciate our customers and vendors,” says Jolly. “It also gives them the opportunity to meet each other, discover new synergies and drive the industry forward.”