Digex Debuts Continuity Services

Digex

In addition to mirroring, the service, called Smart Continuity, includes an offering that splits a customer's Web operations infrastructure between multiple data centers.

American Century, a direct-marketed mutual fund company, is mirroring its online account access and transaction business on each coast in Digex data centers, for example, said Martha Gilbertson, vice president of product management at Digex.

"Many customers are approaching us about disaster recovery and business continuity," she said. "In the evaluation stage, they are looking at how much data they can afford to lose, how quickly they need to be back up and processing, and what they can afford given the size of their company and the risks associated with going down."

The business continuity services are a glimpse of the types of services Digex plans to introduce as it reshapes itself as an enterprise hosting provider, she said.

Partly due to parent company WorldCom's influence, Digex is undergoing a managed services evolution that moves the company beyond hosting intranets, e-mail and basic commerce sites into enterprise services such as transaction processing, high-availability clustering, SAN, IT applications support, content management, data mining and portals.

Digex will maintain its more basic services but will continue to become more of an enterprise player, Gilbertson said.

Digex also plans to engage more systems integrators to help with code and application-specific support. The company currently has informal relationships with Deloitte and Touche and KPMG.

"We are seeking regional players to help with enterprise applications integration, but it is going to take a significant investment from both sides to develop the relationship, back-office processes and go-to-market strategy," she said.