PLDT unit, Swiss firm to offer cloud services

IPC (IP Converge Data Services Inc.), a unit of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.’ s information and communications technology (ICT) arm ePLDT Inc., has partnered with Swiss firm CloudSigma to jointly offer cloud resources in the Philippines.

The partnership marks CloudSigma’s entry to the Asian region.

Apart from Asia, CloudSigma has presence in US and Europe.

“CloudSigma offers one of the most flexible and customizable cloud- based IT infrastructure platforms available in the market. This partnership allows IPC to introduce enhancements into our existing cloud offerings and offer globally competitive cloud services to Philippine-based organizations while addressing data sovereignty and network latency concerns,” IPC president Reynaldo Huergas said in a statement.

CloudSigma’s first Pointof-Presence in the country is hosted in IPC’s state-of-theart data center facilities and locally distributed through the country’s premiere cloud services portal, cloud.com.ph.

“We have been seeing a growing interest from potential customers in the AsiaPacific region and we believe that it’s the perfect time for customers to embrace cloud services, especially with our new Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity offerings that are very relevant for this region. We see IPC as an ideal partner in extending our reach in the Asia-Pacific,” CloudSigma chief executive officer and co-founder Robert Jenkins said.

Jenkins said CloudSigma’s servers offer benefits to customers and as such are highly flexible and capable of running any x86-based operating system including Windows, Linux, Unix and more.

Both IPC and CloudSigma are ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management Systems compliant, indicating all aspects of their services and infrastructure used to deliver and manage cloud platforms conform to international standards of security and data privacy.

In addition, CloudSigma is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Compliant, ensuring the security of payment transactions over the Internet.

“This new cloud will offer low latency computing to all customers throughout the Philippines in a way that hosting in Singapore, Hong Kong or elsewhere just can’t compete with. Furthermore, with data being hosted in-country, clients with sensitive and mission critical data are assured of its security. Our hybrid cloud capabilities make it simple and secure to extend existing physical environments into the cloud,” Jenkins said.

Both firms hope the partnership would encourage more businesses to use enterprise cloud computing.

At present, IPC operates three state-of-the-art data center facilities that are interconnected through a robust network infrastructure, and maintained by certified data center professionals.