OREANDA-NEWS. BT today announced the opening of a new data centre in Colombia to address the growing need for cloud services across Latin America. The new facility, named BT Naos, increases BT's hosted and managed networked IT services capacity to support local and global companies in Latin America.

Demand for data centre services in Colombia and Latin America is rising. IDC estimates that in the next five years the aggregated demand for data centre services will grow by more than 80% in Latin America driven mainly by cloud computing and big data. The Colombian government, through its "Vive Digital" plan, is supporting the adoption of cloud services in the country by promoting the creation of digital folders for storing official documents and medical records.

Through the Naos data centre, customers will benefit from BT's virtualized servers and storage capacity, or they can set up their own dedicated equipment in a secure and high performance environment. Customers can also be connected directly to BT's global network, bringing substantial cost savings and operational efficiencies.

BT Naos is located in the TocancipЁў Free Zone near the city of Bogota, and is the first in Colombia to receive Uptime Institute Tier IV Certification of Design Documents (fault tolerant) . It is connected through superfast fibre broadband to the BT Nimbus centre, located in the FontibЁ®n Free Zone to provide asset redundancy and business continuity between these data centres for all mission critical services and processes. Because both data centres are located in Free Zones, BT and its customers will be able to benefit from tax exemptions, which will make doing business more cost effective and enable investments to be made back into innovation and technology.

Diego Molano Vega, Minister of Information Technology and Communications of Colombia said, "The main objective of the Vive Digital plan is to make the internet accessible to all to create jobs and reduce poverty. The great results we have achieved in the implementation of Vive Digital and the plan in place to improve them, require companies like BT to invest and raise Colombia's technological and innovating profile."

The data centres in Colombia complement the current BT data centres operating in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela and are part of an overall network of more than 20 cloud-enabled data centres across 5 continents and 30 cloud service provider additional data centres on net. This complements the range of capabilities already offered through BT's Compute portfolio, from traditional telehousing and colocation through to the latest public, private and hybrid cloud services.

Bas Burger, president of BT in the Americas, says: "Our new Colombian data centre will help improve performance and availability of cloud-based applications for our customers while keeping cloud data secure at all times. In addition, we will be able to bring the most innovative and creative cloud offerings and propositions from our 'Art of Connecting' campaign to our customers in Latin America."

Carbon reduction is one of BT's Better Future initiatives. BT states its goal is to help customers reduce carbon emissions by at least three times the end to end carbon impact of its own business by 2020. BT Naos was designed to help reach the goal of carbon reduction. For example, the data centre uses hybrid cooling solutions that exploit the water and external heat conditions at the site, in addition to LED illumination and modular and scalable power systems. These carbon reduction strategies make BT Naos one of Latin America's most efficient data centres.