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As many of you know, we officially broke ground on the IBX Vault in February, and we’re enjoying seeing the construction process take place next to our own Vault in Dulles, Va. To kick things off, we’re hosting an event with our partner Equinix, Thursday April 12 from 6-8pm at the Tower Club in Tysons Corner, Va., and we’d love for you to attend!

IT organizations are under increasing pressure to deploy compliant hosting solutions that ensure physical security, data protection, identity management, application security, privacy and reliability. To address these requirements, a variety of regulatory frameworks have been enacted, largely with the goal of increasing security for federal agencies and across a variety of commercial industries...

It’s no secret that health IT has some of the most complex needs of all industries that exist today. Not only are the compliance requirements some of the most non-prescriptive in the IT space, the consequences of not complying can be costly. With more then 10 million individuals employed in the industry in the US, protecting the privacy and confidentiality of a patients’ electronic medical health records from unauthorized access is paramount to achieving compliance with federal regulatory laws such HIPAA, the HITECH Act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other laws that apply to healthcare organizations. What happens if you don’t comply with these health IT compliance requirements? Just ask Cignet Health...

A wise man once told me, "All great partnerships have one thing in common; that is that both parties gain value from the partnership.” To me, this seems pretty obvious, but today in the IT space you see many partnerships of convenience which really just involve product placement or other more one-sided options. That’s part of the reason I'm so excited about the news we announced today with one of our top partners, Equinix. Today, we announced a very special (dare I say unique?) data center that we are building with Equinix and Digital Realty. The building is adjacent to our current "Vault" data center located in Dulles, Va. and is 64,000 square feet, built to tier3 standards. We’re calling it the IBX Vault.

As we were finalizing our own compliance reports this past period, I watched with interest as many hosting companies and auditors rushed to issue or claim they had SSAE16-SOC2. What’s wrong with a SSAE16-SOC2? Well, for starters, it doesn’t exist. In layman's terms, SSAE16 comes in a couple of flavors, but was designed much like the original SAS70 to show controls in support of financial audits and not designed at all for data center operations.

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the GSA IaaS Education Day. While sitting in a room full of federal agency IT and IT acquisition professionals, Keith Trippie, Executive Director for Enterprise System Development Office at US Department of Homeland Security, reviewed DHS roadmap to the cloud and succinctly illustrated the benefits of adopting cloud services.

At Carpathia, we see a lot of pretty unique customer requirements, and from our vantage point, we also have a good view of trends both in terms of technology and workloads. One of the nice things about not being a one trick pony is that we can deliver the full spectrum of infrastructure services, ranging from colo to cloud. With that said, this may not be a particularly well-received post from the pure play cloud crew. From our perspective, we really see somewhat of a maturity model presenting itself.

I spent this week in Orlando at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo talking about clouds from two perspectives – IT and weather – as we endured a vigorous tropical storm dumping buckets of rain in the area. It certainly brought a whole new meaning to "cloud bursting" this week! Kudos to the Gartner team for pulling together a very impressive show, a great mix between the emerging technology providers and more established companies. I ended up splitting my time between the show floor, where Carpathia had a booth, and attending the main sessions at the event.