FireHost Secures $12 Million

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

FireHost extends cloud with $12 funding.  Secure cloud hosting company FireHost announced a $12 million Series D funding round led by investment partner The Stephens Group. The funding will help extend its solutions in secure cloud category. With locations in the U.S. and Europe, FireHost customers span more than 30 countries. “FireHost has had tremendous traction in extending the cloud into the most secure and mission-critical applications, and this investment will enable them to extend their reach in cloud and security innovation. Enterprises can no longer reactively address gaps in security,” said Aaron Clark, vice president at The Stephens Group, LLC. “The company has strong and proven leadership, has a defensible advantage in the market, continues to push innovation and product development and is driven to succeed. As investors, we are thrilled with the company’s continued performance and look forward to our next steps together.”

Equinix selected by  CNSX Markets. Equinix (EQIX) that CNSX Markets Inc. (CNSX Markets) has deployed a point of presence in Equinix's TR1 International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Toronto, Canada. CNSX operates the Canadian National Stock Exchange and Pure Trading.  The CNSX presence in Equinix's Toronto data center enables maximum connectivity, performance and agility for the company, lowering the barrier to entry for dealer participation. "The Equinix data center in downtown Toronto represents a significant concentration of equity market liquidity in Canada," said Richard Carleton, CEO, CNSX Markets. "As an organization, we are constantly looking for ways to assist our dealers and other market participants to reduce costs and network management challenges. By offering our customers a low cost, high performance access to our services through the new point of presence at Equinix we can broaden the access and visibility of our marketplaces."

Colt extends cloud services in Asia.  Colt Technology Services announced enterprise class cloud services in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. By joining together with KVH, Colt will now be able to offer enterprise customers the ability to deploy, manage and automate network and compute resources in both Europe and Asia, remotely from any location. With 10 Colt data centers across Asia and Europe Colt and KVH remove the challenge of managing multiple service providers across continents. "The expanding Asian markets are increasingly attractive for our Eurpean customers looking for growth opportunities outside the euro zone," said Simon Walsh, EVP at Colt. "But this expansion creates a challenge for the CIO who needs to provide remote users with fast and reliable access to business-critical systems while at the same time complying with individual country data sovereignty requirements. This needs to be addressed without the significant CAPEX budget required to build infrastructure locally, or the time to seek out trusted providers in Asia. Colt can now meet customer demand for scalable services in Asia backed up with support in local languages, a single SLA and flexible commercials. Customers can be confident that IT can keep pace with the speed of business transformation but also pave the way for future growth."