UK Data Centres

All of our data centres are in the UK; two in the North West and one in London. Additionally, Venom IT may move customer data to different locations as needed for purposes of providing continuous service as well. But we will never move our clients’ data outside the UK without obtaining their express permission first.

First, we have 3 main data centres in London, Manchester Airport and Salford, respectively.

Each data centre has a pair of military-grade firewalls (in Active-Standby configuration), a pair of network switches (in Active-Standby configuration) and a fully fault-tolerant SAN storage system. Together with a high-availability, fault-tolerant server cluster.

The three data centres configure into one ‘super cluster.’ In short, if 1 or even 2 data centres go down for whatever reason, the remaining data centre(s) will continue to provide service without interruption. This also means that we replicate all data is effectively in triplicate across the 3 data centres.

The Manchester data centres are in Tier 3 facilities, whilst the London data centre is in a Tier 2 facility. Albeit with additional security and DDoS prevention systems in place equivalent to Tier 3. (UK tier rating i.e. Tier 4=highest/military).

All our facilities feature a combination of biometric access controls. As well as 24-hour on-site security, CCTV, virtual tripwires, visitor turnstiles, man-traps, and full-height perimeter fencing.

Full certification

All our data centres are also ISO 27001 certified (the main component for GDPR Technical compliance) with IL4-level security.

All our data centres also have the following systems in place: 

• 2048-bit encryption (considered fit for banking);
• Auto-failover & rollback;
• UPS with 5 to 7-day battery backup, depending on location;
• The various locations use different methods to provide additional backup power e.g. on-site diesel generators, solar panels, and diversely-routed direct 11,000 HV feed from the National Grid.
• Fire protection using VESDA systems and FM200 gas suppression;
• Secure gate access, with 24-hour security control.
• Active system monitoring and DLP are done via several different systems which provide warnings, alarms, alerts, metrics etc. Any errors automatically generate tickets on the CRM system for review and remedial.
• Most systems are dual systems e.g. dual antivirus (hardware & software), dual firewall, dual network switches, dual, triple or quadruple Internet service (depending on location), dual spam filtering (hardware & software), and dual DDoS protection (dual hardware systems).

The Venom IT head office in Sale is fitted with standard security measures for staffed IT offices, such as electronic access control with zone separation, visitor sign-in, internal and external CCTV, and fire alarms.

• Our offices are ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified
• We adhere to and are independently audited on:
  –     ISO 27017 code of practice for cloud providers and;
  –     ISO 27018 controls and guidelines for protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) within the public cloud computing environment, incorporating regulatory requirements such as GDPR.