Madrid, 3 June 2014.- Telefónica 's Alcalá Data Center has just celebrated its first anniversary; it has become Europe's largest data center and the world's third biggest and has obtained TIER IV Gold certification. The certification confirms that the most exacting requirements have been met as regards Uptime Institute standards; this ensures the center's operational sustainability and attests to its high level of infrastructure availability.

With over 1,000 visits to its premises in recent months the center provides a service to business customers in Spain’s major economic sectors. This has endowed it with benchmark status worldwide in terms of design, implementation and operation, guaranteeing the highest levels of uptime, flexibility, reliability, security and efficiency.

A new demonstration area which specializes in cloud services has been added to the center. This is the Alcalá Innovation Center, where companies, institutions and partners can see the chief technology solutions which Telefónica delivers to its customers to enhance their business processes.

The center is located in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, and is the cornerstone of Telefónica's Data Center consolidation strategy, as well as one of the company's four new generation strategic data centers globally, which will act as hubs for a small number of satellite data centers that will support local services.

All of Telefónica's data centers will be inter-connected via a corporate global network, all supervised and operated under one roof. This will allow Telefónica to optimize infrastructure use, enhance virtualization levels, phase out obsolete equipment and standardize the infrastructure's operating model in step with the company's global objectives.

UK, Spanish and German services are being established at the Alcalá Data Center in addition to global processes, thereby making inroads into improving the levels of quality, simplification and standardisation, which are key to Grupo Telefónica's transformation.

Within this context the company has bolstered its cloud service model, this technology being the mainstay for the architecture of the other solutions which Telefónica offers companies (workstations, unified communications, data connectivity, M2M, security, etc.).

The company has developed its cloud technology offering for companies to the point of materializing the Hybrid Cloud or Corporate Cloud concept through its Virtual Data Center 2.0 service. This solution enables the merging of corporate private clouds with Telefónica's own public cloud, thus satisfying the needs typical of a corporate environment when it comes to guaranteeing the operation of critical applications and allowing flexible development of the company's cloud infrastructure.



A leading international Data Center

Besides TIER IV Gold as mentioned, in this its maiden year the Alcalá Data Center has received several awards and certifications, bearing testament to the fact that it has met the required standards of excellence of the most demanding regulations worldwide in its category.



TIER IV GOLD

Certification recently awarded by the Uptime Institute which also gauges the design and implementation of the center according to the most exacting standards of redundancy, management and automated operation after at least six months of activity and including a guarantee of recovery in the event of incidents. The certification also assesses other factors such as preventive, corrective, and predictive strategies, as well as emergency response procedures. The Gold category is the highest among those awarded by this particular organisation.



LEEDS GOLD

The Leeds Gold certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) conferred by the US Green Building Council in the category of Newly Constructed Buildings. It confirms that the Alcalá Data Center is energy-efficient, this being a standard applied since the rollout of this project.



BRILL AWARDS FOR EFFICIENT IT

The Alcalá Data Center has been given this award in the category of Global Leadership Awards. The company Uptime Institute uses these awards to acknowledge those projects worldwide which have attained the highest efficiency levels in Data Center and IT operations in all of their phases, from design and building through to start-up and operation processes.

It thus presents three Global Leadership Awards to those companies whose projects have displayed a global vision in their commitment to efficiency in the IT world. Telefónica has been recognised as one such award-winning company in 2014 for developing a corporate standard for the design and construction of new Data Centers based on a modular and flexible approach.



The Alcalá Innovation Center: the place to see and ‘touch’ the cloud

Another of the major news items this year is the Alcalá Innovation Center, which is one of Spain's most innovative ICT demonstration areas, a place where Telefónica's key services for companies and institutions are on display for interactive use. Located inside the Alcalá Data Center, the center specializes in Cloud Computing solutions. Different environments are recreated within the show area featuring cutting-edge technology so that visitors can experience the advantages of the cloud firsthand, as well as Telefónica's corporate services.