TierPoint is a US Based Datacenter company with 37+ colocation facilities across 50 states, delivering hosting, network services, security, compliance, disaster recovery, IT & managed services.  They boast an industry-leading uptime SLA of 100% across their assets with a minimum N+1 design.  Clients can expect the traditional space, power, and bandwidth coupled with fire suppression, security controls, security, and more.

Datacenter Tier Classification

The colocation facilities of Datacenters are rated by Tier I to Tier IV by the Uptime Institute and operations should truly understand the definition.  The classifications often confuse customers due to a “Tier-1” moniker is not as high as Tier-4.  It’s very common in the industry to use general tech slang stating “Tier-1” is a requirement, however, if you are not familiar with out the Uptime Institute classifies data centers, your ask could be less than you expected.  To view TierPoint’s classifications it’s all publically available on their website.  Keep in mind, that classifications are generally higher compared to an IT Datacenter internally.

 

IT Migration & Professional Services:

TierPoint utilizes its internal resources to identify, architect, plan, and execute across a myriad of scenarios within its IT portfolio.  This helps enable organizations to utilize certified and experienced personnel to support customer environments vs. being solely a colocation provider.

Some of TierPoint’s IT services include key Cloud Readiness Assessments which can be instrumental in a proper lift and shift migration to IaaS.  Often, IT organizations know their environment and architecture but have not had the cycles to truly assess moving to the cloud.  Areas such as how many VMs and the capacity used are just the starting points of a good assessment.

Once an organization has fully assessed the options and desired outcomes of cloud migration, TierPoint can assist with the actual migration.  This can be important and helpful if you are choosing a common public cloud company

 

Additional Professional Services include:

  • Physical Migrations:
  • Security Assessments:
  • Business Continuity Planning:

 

TierPoint Expansion:

TierPoint recently announced additional expansion of their portfolio with a new facility under construction.  Many might wonder why additional colocation capacity is required as more applications migrate to public IaaS?  Due to the influx of private data centers shutting down post-covid, many companies still require non-cloud-ready services to be supported out of a traditional data center.

 

TierPoint Partners:

The company boasts a who’s who across key cloud, application, and storage providers globally to support a niche ecosystem.  More organizations have lifted many of their applications out of the data center into public cloud and TierPoint embraces this with a Hybrid Cloud approach with such partners as AWS.

TierPoint Certifications

 

Sarbanes Oxley(SOX):  Outside of specific controls and 5% variance within financial reporting, SOX outlines in sections 302, 404 and 409 an organization must have adequate monitoring, logging and audit of Network Activity, Database Activity, Login Activity, Information Access, Account & User Activity.

HIPAA:   The HIPAA Report on Compliance, or HROC, is used to determine whether a Datacenter provider has met the standards by HIPAA which is typically required in the healthcare vertical.

NERC:  The North American Electric Reliability Corporation is a certification most would expect based on the vast power consumed both for internal control and customer colocation environments.  NERC monitors operators to ensure they maintain their required credentials to work in system control centers across North America.

ITAR:  ITAR is the regulatory compliance to prevent and control the export of defense and military tech to protect the US national security and foreign policy objectives for the country.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC):  FTC compliance ensures the organization prevents consumer fraud, deception and any other unfair business acts.

 

In summary, TierPoint has built a diversified portfolio, backed by industry-leading certifications and compliance to support environments across the US.  Tours both physical and virtual do exist to explore a colo environment prior to selecting them as a partner.

As consolidation continues, colocation and managed services will still support the rising tides of cloud adoption.  Companies are not left in the dark if all applications are not cloud-native and need to be supported commercially in a Tier+ facility.  IT teams can expect to consolidate across their current vendors or internal data centers and the use of a third-party migration service is Macronet’s recommendation.  We’ve helped many organizations downsize and right-size their data center environments for the 21st century while effectively connecting to Cloud resources.