One-stop offering delivers highly secure, cost effective and hassle-free data centre service to customers in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region

News Release – November 22, 2012

(Hong Kong, 22 November 2012) – Automated Systems Holdings Limited (‘ASL’ or ‘the Group’)(SEHK stock code: 771), a leading information technology (IT) services provider in the region, today announced the launch of Hong Kong’s first Security Operation Center (SOC) based data centre service.Leveraging the company’s industry renowned SOC, Automated Systems (HK) Limited (‘Automated’) will provide a highly secure, cost effective and hassle-free data centre service for local and regional customers.

The SOC-based data centre service is designed for both large corporations and SMEs in Hong Kong, as well as from other countries in the region that are planning to adopt cloud computing to improve their competitive advantage.Its data centre is equipped with fully redundant infrastructure, ensuring high availability and business continuity. It offers Tier III+1 facility standard with optimum environment to keep customers’ servers up and running on a 24×7 basis.

With the increasing adoption of cloud technologies, demand for data centre services from businesses of all sizes is growing exponentially. At the same time, cloud adoption has also heightened the risks of unauthorised access and malicious attacks to companies’ IT systems. According to a survey conducted by the independent analyst and consultancy firm Ovum, the biggest challenges in using cloud services within enterprises is data security (85%), followed by regulatory and compliance issues (73%)2.

“In view of the unprecedented demand for highly secure data centre services from our customers, we think this is the right time to launch the first-of-its-kind data centre service with all-round IT security services from our SOC in Hong Kong,” said Mr. Henry Hui, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Automated Systems Holdings Limited. “Hong Kong is an ideal place to deploy data centre operations with its well established infrastructure including reliable power supply, comprehensive network systems, international standard business environment, as well as its geographical advantages (proximity to Mainland China) and low risk of natural disasters. As a leading systems integrator in Hong Kong, we can meet the increasing demand for data centre service in the region by leveraging our cloud deployment experience in particular.”

With more than a decade of experience in offering data centre and related services, Automated’s SOC-based data centre service combines its data centre service with the managed security protection and services from SOC. Unlike other data centre services available in the market, the newly-launched SOC-based data centre service provides 7x24x365 real time remote monitoring, detecting and reporting. With support from an onsite team of certified security experts, SOC is well equipped with advanced Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system to identify suspicious threats instantly to provide around-the-clock monitoring, and a swift response to critical incidents. The service can analyse over a hundred million events regionally every day to provide enterprise-wide protection from known and emerging threats, enabling organisations to minimise risks and attacks to their data centres. The combined service will enable customers to reduce total cost of ownership and increase return on their IT investments, while ensuring comprehensive protection of data.

In addition, with its strong network of partnerships with worldwide renowned IT vendors and global standard certifications under ISO 20000 IT Service Management (ITSM) and ISO 27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS), Automated provides its customers with a full range of advanced IT services and solutions to give them full-fledged support for their data centre needs. These include disaster recovery and business continuity, data centre managed services and data centre operation outsourcing.

“Today’s announcement is a momentous milestone for us, and underscores our commitment to helping our customers to transform their business by leveraging cloud technologies. Our SOC-based data centre service is designed for customers who are looking for an IT partner to build a safe and cost effective cloud computing environment. More importantly, our one-stop service allows customers to free up their internal IT resources to focus on their core business,” said Mr. Hui. “With the vigorous effort from the HKSAR government in fostering the development of Hong Kong as a regional data centre hub in Asia Pacific, our SOC-based data centre service is a timely response and accelerator of the economic development of the city.”

1A concurrently maintainable infrastructure with expected availability of 99.982%. (TIA-942: Data Center Standards Overview)

2Ovum Straighttalk (IT Q2 2012):http://ovum.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/STQ_IT_2Q12.pdf

 
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