RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (Aug. 14, 2012) – MCNC, the independent non-profit operator of the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) that serves community anchor institutions throughout North Carolina, today announced that it has been certified compliant with Service Organization Control (SOC 2) data center standards after successfully completing an independent audit conducted by Assure Professionals.
SOC 2 is the latest in a series of new data center audits designed to provide customers with critical information on the internal controls put in place by data center providers. The advanced certification provides a standard benchmark by which two data center audits can be compared against the same set of pre-defined criteria relating to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and/or privacy of a system and its information.
With the retirement of the SAS 70 standard last year, SOC 2 provides data center users a high level of assurance that their data center is secure and operating under a consistent set of high-integrity processes. Compliance enhances MCNC’s existing capability to provide secure colocation and managed hosting services on NCREN for applications and data common today in education, health care, law enforcement and other public sectors.
“The North Carolina Hospital Association (NCHA) is pleased to work with MCNC as a colocation facility for many of our Internet servers and our video conferencing system,” said NCHA Chief Information Officer Mark Bell. “MCNC has great facilities and a reputation to match. We especially value the maturity of their statewide fiber network, facility security, power generation, and technical support.”
MCNC operates a 5,000 square-foot data center with 150 tons of redundant cooling, a 900kVA redundant battery-backed UPS system, and a 1250kVA diesel generator with a week’s worth of fuel. MCNC is consistently adding to its data center portfolio and provides 24×7 power, cooling, network, and people to ensure a customer’s IT infrastructure is always up and operating. The data center also has redundant physical and geographical connections to the NCREN backbone, 24x7x365 picture badge access, security, alarming systems, monitoring, and a seasoned support staff available 24 hours a day.
MCNC’s data center offers three service models: colocation, data protection, and managed hosting. MCNC’s NOC staff and Client Network Engineers team hold certifications from Microsoft, Red Hat, and ISC2, offering a range of expertise from the most basic managed hosting services to more advanced performance monitoring, digital diagnostics, architecture assessments and planning, system tuning, IT management, and planning services. For more information, view the MCNC Service Catalog.
“Our commitment to excellence and transparency for our customers led us to undertake this extensive effort, validating our security procedures and making those results available to the NCREN community,” said John Killebrew, NCREN’s Vice President of Community Support at MCNC. “This report gives our customers a higher level of confidence that our security protocols are being enforced to ensure our customers’ mission-critical computing systems are protected.”
Learn more about MCNC’s data center and services at NCREN Community Day 2012 on Nov. 15-16 at Elon University.
