IT services provider Ocean Intelligent Communications and central London data centre City Lifeline are partnering to provide clients of the two companies with a complete managed IT service. The partnership covers support for both within and beyond the walls of the data centre - giving customers of both companies complete confidence in the resilience of their entire IT infrastructure.

This new venture means that customers operating IT infrastructure from the City Lifeline data centre facility in Clifton Street now have access to a dedicated team of IT engineers from Ocean, whose Network Operations Centre (NOC) is also based in Clifton Street. The partnership enables clients to add dedicated expertise to their own IT team, without the associated headcount cost, using Ocean to swiftly deal with any IT issues within the data centre and freeing up the internal team to focus on day to day aspects of their role. Ocean engineers will be on hand 24/7 - either remotely or by visiting the City Lifeline site – to respond to anything from connectivity issues to an IT security breach.

“At Ocean, we want to build relationships with clients and help them to deliver on their IT strategies by providing as much communications and service as each individual customer requires. We are able to provide ad-hoc, break-fix support as required, but in our experience companies using an offsite data centre want complete confidence that their servers and network communications are being constantly monitored and that any issues are dealt with swiftly, often before the client even realises there is a problem,” explains Jason Osmond at Ocean.

“At City Lifeline, we already provide one of the best connected carrier neutral data centres in London.  We upgraded to Tier 3 standards some years ago and we operate to ISO27001 security standards.  With this new relationship with Ocean, we are able to offer a complete package to our clients who want more comprehensive services, adding real-time management of servers, network communications and operating systems. Together with Ocean, we can be an extension of our customers’ IT teams, providing support for their total IT and network infrastructure, not just the data centre,” said Roger Keenan at City Lifeline.

This partnership is the next logical step in the evolution of both companies. Ocean has a proven heritage in providing a total managed service for clients with experts across all facets of IT and City Lifeline is the longest established data centre in central London. Together, the two companies now provide an all-round total service to customers, both onsite and offsite.  Customers can have total IT peace of mind, with a service tailored to their needs, ranging from simple carrier neutral colocation only, up to complete management of their servers, networks and operating systems.