The industry body for data centres has launched a certification scheme aimed at guaranteeing the quality and resilience of services.
The Data Centre Alliance (DCA) says its Data Centre Certification programme reflects customer business goals rather than pure technical requirements.
A number of companies approved by the DCA will carry out the audits, which will cover power resilience, connectivity and cabling resilience, environmental control resilience, operations and maintenance processes and professionalism, physical site access and energy efficiency strategy. The DCA will be the certifying authority.
Simon Campbell-Whyte, DCA Executive Director, said: "Until now, people buying data centre services had no sure-fire or simple way to judge the true quality and resilience of a data centre – unless they themselves were highly technical and could perform detailed and often expensive audits.
"Equally, although data centres may, or may not, be built and operated to existing voluntary standards, there was no readily affordable and truly independently audited over-arching certification which they could undertake - to gain independent third party attestation of the quality, operational integrity, energy efficiency and resilience of their offering."
He added that the programme had been developed by DCA members, and that it has been based on existing guidelines and standards. Data centres will have to re-audited every two years to retain the certificate.
Companies lined up to carry out the audits include include PTS Consulting, CST Technology, Future Tech and Cerios.