As the man heading-up Kao Data’s drive to continually upgrade our campus’s network and carrier connections, I was thoroughly delighted this week to see us announce our new partnership with our friends at Megaport.

Establishing new connectivity partners in a data centre is sometimes a tricky process, but in the case of Megaport it’s been smooth sailing. Before I continue I should say a huge thank you to the superb support from Megaport’s team and especially Neil Gallagher and Jed Brintzenhoff. At Kao Data’s end, my colleagues Howard Spooner and Spencer Lamb have been integral in getting this over the line.

So, back to the news – and this is a genuine milestone in Kao Data’s development since the company was founded in 2014, and we went operational as a campus in 2018. Since day one, we’ve been able to provide our customers with excellent connectivity options at our carrier neutral campus, but Megaport’s arrival really opens the door for our customers to access dedicated, low-latency connectivity directly into the giant hyperscale clouds.

Like many data centres, over the course of 2020 we’ve seen an increase in colocation demand as companies ‘beef-up’ their business continuity options, and look to migrate servers off-premise. This is even more the case with cloud and the ‘cloud first’ policy we’re seeing in many large organisations. So being able to offer world-class hybrid computing through OCP-Ready certified colocation, and rapid access into the cloud is a game changer.

Operationally this will all be available from Q1, 2021. As soon as the Megaport connection is live we will be able to offer direct, secure and private software-defined networking (SDN) access to a global connectivity ecosystem. As such our customers will benefit from direct data centre to data centre interconnections as well as multi cloud and cloud-to-cloud connectivity via the clever Megaport Cloud Router (MCR). In addition Megaport’s MegaIX enables customers to access Internet exchanges on a global basis, to source and share content across global networks. More on that interesting topic here.

Our campus in Harlow is strategically located just north of London within the UK Innovation Corridor, making it perfectly placed to serve the growing HighTech, MedTech and FinTech communities in London and Cambridge. Uniquely, we will be the closest Megaport presence to Cambridge’s scientific and research clusters.

Megaport’s ability to guarantee ultrafast and secure connectivity to the popular hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, combined with our data centre experience and knowhow means we are able to satisfy demand from these growing sectors – many of whom are using the latest high performance computing (HPC) and GPU-powered AI technologies.

These intensive computing users will benefit from significantly faster upload and download times for a wealth of autonomous applications reliant on low latency connectivity, so rapidly changing data can be processed and acted upon in real time. For finance companies, a few seconds can equate to millions, sometimes billions of dollars, for scientists monitoring earthquakes or tracking severe storms, accurate info can mean the difference between evacuating a large area or not, for medical research, faster diagnosis and more effective treatment plans are possible.

Millisecond delays are of little consequence for manual processes that require human involvement. However, for M2M applications, the smallest of delays can result in a total system failure.

Having the ability to bypass the public Internet means we can deliver a better quality of service experience though heightened security and 100% uptime for around the clock operations with greater resilience and predictability. It’s also incredibly easy to access – users can onboard to the service using Megaport’s Point of Presence (PoP) within one of our ‘Meet-Me’ suites in the data centre.

Helping our customers do more of what they do, easier, faster and at industrial scale is exactly what Kao Data excels in. With Megaport joining us we’ve added a turbo boost to our already first class service, and it’s fantastic to have them onboard.