Oper8 Global: Integrated Approach Towards Data Centre and Security Landscape

With offices in UK and Australia, Oper8 Global is an IT management firm delivering world-class edge, HPC, security, and modular data centre solutions. The company enables clients to leverage a collaborative ecosystem and as-a-service subscription models for right-sizing their IT architecture. “We offer high security technology infrastructure including modular data centres that meet the European security ratings, SR3, SR4, SR5, and SR6, as well as ensure data security at the edge, on premise, in a colocation or cloud data centre model to cover the entire IT infrastructure,” says Mike Andrea, CEO, Oper8 Global.

Security Always Comes First

Oper8 has designed unique partnership models to deliver its solutions to clients and ensure the right blend of form, function, and cost. For example, the company’s turnkey Hardware Security Modules (HSM) solution PayG8, is developed and delivered in collaboration with Thales and Equinix. This has enabled Oper8 to launch payG8 as a service to offer high levels of physical and logical security with high availability options to support multicloud and hybrid environments.

Upping the ante of the partnership model, Oper8 has collaborated with RF Code—a leading provider of data centre monitoring tools—to do real-time asset tracking and rack monitoring within the PayG8 service model. Endorsing, as well as integrating, RF Code capabilities into its service model, Oper8 provides simpler, cost-effective solutions for their clients. Oper8 has also created a modular enterprise grade data protection suite that covers four critical areas; identity and access management, data in motion, data at rest, and key management. This product set is represented under the netG8 banner. “PayG8 and netG8 can be delivered as a service or as straight products,” says Andrea.

In 2022, Oper8 will launch another solution— dubbed dataM8—a protected cloud adjacent storage that works in the multi-cloud/hybrid cloud and guards enterprises from ransom attacks. I n d i v i d u a l products like NetG8 and dataM8 can be integrated to create a localised hybrid cloud storage model to enable centralised replication in the global file system (GFS).

This helps protect clients’ networks by isolating the operational management system of the data centre from the IT operations. Independently securing IT systems from the data centres eliminates cross-pollination of any cyber threat—protecting both the data in motion and data at rest.

NetG8 and dataM8 will further be supported by Oper8’s safeG8, a recent addition to the company’s solution arsenal. It is a rack-mounted safe with a range of options, including secure OTP access to keys or critical devices.

Not stopping there, Oper8 wraps its data centre solutions with other professional services, including operational support, maintenance, monitoring platforms, monitoring as a service, and data centre management as a service. The aim is to offer operation performance management to an existing data centre and help clients through upgrades, replacements, or capacity enhancements using modular techniques.

An Integrated Solution Delivery Ensuring Successful Client Partnerships

Leveraging wide expertise in data centre design, architecture, audit, and turnkey data centre operations, Oper8 has been onboarded on projects from concept plans to detailed design and delivery. The company now serves clients in multiple jurisdictions in the Pacific and Pacific islands, including research organisations, the health sector, banking, finance, and insurance (BFI) sector, and F1 teams. For example, Oper8 worked in liaison with a university as part of their disaster recovery program. The primary objective of the project was to deploy data centres with robust, future-proof security architecture. The turnkey, micronodular data centre had a fully redundant design in an IP66-rated enclosure. Within the enclosure, Oper8 also did out-of-band operational management across all monitoring systems for the modular micro data centre.

This model was then extended to include monitoring of the primary data centre, with operational separation of the monitoring systems and the management systems. A dual VPN solution was also installed to protect the internal network, the management network, and the monitoring network—both internally and externally. To hold it all together, Oper8 also enabled an out-of-band 4G interconnect as a backup and failover for high vulnerability in the monitoring systems.

In the coming years, Oper8 will grow as the market driver for capacity and capability across the Asian market while bolstering its reseller models with partners in Paraguay, Poland, and the United Arab Emirates.

As a Thales Platinum Partner, the future of Oper8’s business model is firmly rooted in HPC and security solutions. The company’s goals for the next 12 to 18 months are focused heavily on deploying HPC as a service (HPCaaS). Integrating it with their modular data centres will enable Oper8 to deliver the capability in an SR3, SR4, or SR5-rated enclosure.

Truly, with a proactive relationship with key partners and R&D geared towards innovation, Oper8 is powering its vision to make IT simple and secure.