IDENTIFYING THE CHALLENGES

All mobile operators have grown across a large number of geographies – often through acquisition. They face a significant task of rationalising, integrating and consolidating their infrastructure to achieve gains in efficiency at reduced costs. Keeping pace with change means that operators are forced to spend more time on the IT systems underpinning their business. The new technology has to be resilient, reliable and available to preserve brand values and maintain end-customer service levels.

EXPLORING THE SOLUTIONS

BT has a world class capability for providing monitored and managed servers on which operators can run their Internet, intranet or extranet solutions within BT's fully managed data centres. We can support operators with the design of their solution – from the simplest to the most demanding enterprise applications and critical data. BT Data Centre Services offers customers a reliable IT platform for their applications. This is hosted in a secure and controlled environment at one or more BT data centres, with resilient and flexible connectivity via the Internet and BT's Wide Area Network Services. BT assumes responsibility for the design, build, monitoring and management of the IT platform. This includes the operating system and various applications (such as databases, messaging, webserver software and server-based computing solutions). We use ‘best in class’ hardware from HP, Sun, EMC, Cisco and Nokia, and best in class software from Sun, Redhat, Microsoft, Trendmicro, Symantec, Oracle and IBM.

The IT platforms are protected by BT Data Centre Services, using a broad range of managed security services in the data centre.

The service is designed for 24x7 availability of applications and data to end users.

Data Centre Services are commercially harmonised for the Benelux countries, Germany, Spain and Ireland, and will be extended to other countries in the near future.

Fig 1. BT Data Centre Services capabilities

REAPING THE BENEFITS

• Cost savings through consolidation and restructuring
• Reduced IT spend
• Improved physical security, systems security and business continuity
• Improved service and cost management
• Savings on buildings