1. iomart

iomart was founded in 1998 by Scottish entrepreneur Angus MacSween, who spotted the opportunity to provide managed Internet services to businesses requiring support for their growing IT infrastructures.

In 2007, recognising the game-changing onset of cloud computing, iomart took the strategic decision to invest in its own hosting infrastructure and acquired its first four data centres. The company now owns ten at eight locations across the UK, all connected via a 1,800km fast, high capacity fibre network, offering the ‘cloud holy grail’ of multi data centre site redundancy.

Through its direct ownership of every layer of the cloud, iomart is solely accountable for all aspects of the customer experience. This enables it to stand behind 100% uptime SLAs to customers including Stagecoach, Skyscanner and Liverpool FC. The company’s award-winning control panel enables customers to manage every aspect of their services at the tap of a screen.

iomart continues to invest in new generation technologies and recently unveiled its first Software Defined Data Centre in Maidenhead.

iomart’s 24×7 technical support team numbers more than 100 – which is more than most hosting companies’ entire workforce – and last year was its most successful yet with revenues reaching £55.6m.

At a glance:

– 10 fully owned and managed UK data centres.

– Own private, fast, dark fibre network.

– Industry-leading SLAs.

– Developed one of the UK’s first Software Defined Data Centres.

– Huge technical customer support service team.

2. 4D Data Centres

4D Data Centres was set up in 1999 by David Barker (technical director) when he was 14! It’s small with 25 staff, but has experienced impressive growth and is proud of its technical innovation and top service to clients.

The company runs one of the few independently owned, green data centre businesses in the UK. This Tier 3 rackspace provider is based at its own flagship data site in Surrey. It also provides colocation and connectivity services in three other data centres in The City, London Docklands and Kent. Other services include server colocation, dedicated servers, leased lines, ADSL lines and managed services.

4D’s customers have access to their racks 24/7, plus support from on-site engineers.

4D also offers ultra-fast connectivity to the UK’s main communication hubs and other major colocation providers throughout the South-East. Owning its own diverse dark fibre to Points of Presence (POPs) in major data centres in London, 4D believes it is rapidly becoming one of the major communications providers in the region.

4D pioneered CO2 reduction techniques with its evaporative cooling system, winning the Green DataCentre Project of the Year Award 2012 from DataCentre Solutions magazine. 4D Surrey now boasts a PUE of 1.14 which makes it one of the greenest data centres on the planet.

Recently the company’s rapid growth has been acknowledged with listings in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 UK (a ranking of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in this country) for 2012 and 2013. This follows progression every year up the Deloitte Tech Fast 500 EMEA listings since 2010. In 2013 4D achieved ISO27001 accreditation for the whole business operation.

At a glance:

– Top green credentials: use of energy-efficient, eco-friendly evaporative cooling to give a PUE of 1.14.

– Unrivalled customer service: 24/7 access to clients & round the clock support.

– Some of the fastest connectivity available today using its own dark fibre to POPs.

– The 4D Surrey data centre is owned outright by the company, meaning it is not controlled by a conglomerate so 4D can push the boundaries of technology to maximise efficiency and performance, & also shape its business/products around customers’ needs.

– Focused on the needs of smaller companies in the South-East.

3. Volta Data Centre

Volta is a specialist developer and operator of purpose-designed, carrier-neutral data centres.
Its first high specification facility, located in Great Sutton Street (GSS), is a Tier III stand-alone 91,000ft2 data centre in immediate proximity to the City of London.

Designed to address the ever increasing infrastructure demands of businesses requiring a central London location, Volta GSS provides the communities on its doorstep – including cloud and managed service providers, media and content industries, the latency sensitive financial services and legal communities – with a highly flexible, secure and scalable IT and hosting environment.

Volta GSS is said to offer resilience unparalleled in central London, benefiting from two separate 33kV supplies, with ultra-fast connectivity linking customers to a variety of world-class carriers, cloud providers, business partners, networks and major internet exchanges.

At a glance:

– Benefitting from two separate 33kV supplies of 9.6MVA by Q1 2015, from two independent grid substations, Volta Great Sutton Street provides a level of resilience that no other central London data centre can match.

– Ultra-low latency access to key trading venues. Volta Great Sutton Street has some of the world’s leading carriers to ensure ultra-fast, resilient connectivity.

– Volta Great Sutton is a low-profile, dedicated, stand-alone data centre offering a high level of security. This includes 24 hour surveillance and bomb blast protection measures, with the option of private cages for those who wish to house their data in an ultra-secured environment.

– Previously operating as a data centre for twenty-five years, the 91,000ft2 Volta Great Sutton Street site has been completely redesigned and refitted, featuring hot aisle containment with Row-Based cooling systems. This makes Volta one of the most energy efficient data centres in London.

4. Sentronex

Founded in 2005, Sentronex provides managed IT services to London’s financial community including IT support, Disaster Recovery (DR), consultancy, cloud computing and connectivity as well as hosting solutions. With its own data centre in outer London, Sentronex feels it is well placed to support the hosting needs and requirements of a range of City-based clients from hedge funds and asset managers, to larger brokers and investment banks.

Over the past 12 months, Sentronex has invested heavily in its infrastructure and following £250,000 worth of capital investment, the data centre underwent a full refurbishment and renovation. Sentronex installed a new air conditioning system that uses the latest free-cooling technology and works with Mitsubishi CRAC units to improve energy efficiency. The company also carried out power and UPS upgrades, enhanced fire prevention systems throughout and extended the main data hall to increase the facility’s cabinet capacity.

Moving forward, Sentronex has plans in place to make systems even more resilient and consequently move the data centre from a tier 2 to a tier 3 facility.

At a glance:

– The latest, eco-friendly technology: despite rising power prices, the data centre operates an eco-friendly, free air cooling system that has halved energy costs. These savings are passed directly onto Sentronex clients while bringing the facility in line with green standards.

– Location benefits: on the outskirts of London in Romford, Essex, the data centre is easily accessible via train from Liverpool Street Station yet geographically far enough away from the business and financial districts of the capital to minimise concern.

– Scalability of service offering – in the last 12 months, Sentronex has increased their hosting capacity at the data centre by an impressive 130%. There is now the platform to scale to support many more financial clients as well as scale existing clients’ solutions as required.

– Fully managed 24/7/365: at the Sentronex data centre, there is the added bonus of a fully qualified 1st and/or 2nd line engineer on site around the clock to react immediately should any issue arise.

5. Alert Logic

Alert Logic provides security and compliance for cloud, hybrid and on-premise infrastructure, allowing customers to benefit from deep security insight and continuous protection at a lower cost than legacy security offerings. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure is deployed. The company partners with the some of the best cloud platforms and hosting providers to protect more than 2,700 organisations worldwide. Built for cloud scale, our patented platform manages Petabytes of data, analyzes 255 million security events monthly, and identifies 40,000 incidents a month that are managed by our security operations team. Alert Logic recently expanded internationally by establishing UK offices in London and Cardiff.

At a glance:

– Alert Logic secures data and applications in any infrastructure, be it cloud, on premise or a hybrid environment.

– The company has its own dedicated Security Operations Centre and team to provide 24×7 support and protection for customers.

– It has expanded to the UK in 2014 and has its own data centre based in Cardiff (live August 2014).

– Alert Logic partners with the leading cloud and hosting providers and protects over 350 organisations in the UK.

– It a rapidly growing UK customer base as a result of its new UK data centre and operations.

6. MigSolv

MigSolv markets itself as a data centre operator with a difference. Borne out of one of Europe’s most swuccesful independent data centre consultancies, MigSolv’s award-winning data centre is operated by the very people who developed and wrote the processes for running a service-led data centre that are now regarded as industry best practice. Unlike many data centres, MigSolv does not outsource the facility management, instead preferring to operate the facility with its own in-house maintenance team that are on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company operates on a preventative-plant maintenance scheme rather than a reactive plant repair scheme.

While ensuring that the data centre is one of the most secure data centres anywhere in the UK, the environmental efficiency is also high on the agenda with all cost savings shared with customers. MigSolv takes a huge pride providing exceptional service to its customers. Offering colocation at low cost, MigSolv believes that both resilience and redundancy are paramount and of equal importance as security and efficiency – above all, the service provided to the customer is intended to be exceptional and consistent.

At a glance:

– Winner of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Efficiency

– Winner of the EU Green Light Programme

– ISO 27001, 14001 and 9001 Certified, along with PCI DSS Level 1 accreditation

– Shortlisted as ‘Best Colocation Provider of the Year 2014’ at the International Data Centre and Cloud Awards

– Consistently given 5 out of 5 stars for service by its customers.

 

7. Brocade

Brocade says it is leading the way in data centre networking, developing technologies that will enable the world’s leading organisations to transition smoothly to a virtualised world where applications and information reside anywhere. The company offers a complete data centre networking portfolio that provides the foundation for addressing critical business objectives while also being at the forefront of networking technologies that could underpin the next big waves of innovation: from the Internet of Things to Big Data.

Today, Brocade solutions are used in more than 90% of Global 1000 data centres as well as in enterprise LANs and the largest service provider networks.

At a glance:

– Brocade networking solutions enable institutions at all levels of education, such as their work with the University of Westminster, to implement BYOD, Big Data, Analytics, SDN or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) initiatives cost-effectively with room to scale.

– The firm’s networks enable healthcare organisations to deliver information at the ‘speed of care’ using a highly reliable and robust network. Recently, Brocade has implemented the essential networking infrastructure required at Doncaster and Basset Law NHS foundation Trust to support planned electronic patient records system.

– Brocade has put its IT innovation into action by deploying data centre solutions in its own world-class and energy-efficient data centre.

8. CenturyLink Technology Solutions

CenturyLink Technology Solutions has five UK data centres, among its 56 globally, and is one of the largest colocation providers in the world – but it’s much more than that. CenturyLink’s employs data centre technicians and engineers with an average of 16 years’ experience and take huge pride in the running of the data centre. Everything from cabling to racking and stacking can be done to two standards: satisfactory and perfection. The CenturyLink approach is perfection. Even the small things like the way cabling is done can have a knock on effect that impacts a data centre’s efficiency. When the technicians feel a sense of ownership, they’ll make sure it’s done properly.

At a glance:

– 100% uptime SLA.

– Hybrid service capability.

– Self-service colocation capabilities through to fully managed options.

– Carrier neutral – but interconnected by the CenturyLink metro fibre rings

– Our people. This is the big one for CenturyLink. Many other data centre companies, including some of CenturyLink’s biggest competitors, don’t employ their own people to run the data centre.

9. Colt

Colt owns and operates 20 data centres, located in 10 major countries across Europe, with 24/7 protection and support. It’s carrier neutral data centres provide direct access to Europe’s major financial and business centres via its 44,000km high capacity network, while the strategic location of Colt colocation facilities enables high-grade proximity hosting solutions to be delivered and operated outside high-risk geographic centres. Its unique approach provides customers with the flexibility to scale as needed, and plan for their evolving business.

In the UK, Colt’s most notable data centre is London data centre 3 – the company’s largest data centre hub in London renowned for its operational excellence, state-of-the-art technology, resilience and security. It is one of three carrier neutral London data centres that Colt operates, with direct connectivity between them and a further 59 third party data centres and actively connected to almost 2,000 buildings all in the London area. The data centre, which has been awarded the Uptime Institute’s Management & Operations Stamp of Approval, provides a total power provision of 33 MVA and has an industry leading Design PUE of 1.21. It is designed and built to Colt Tier III standards.

At a glance:

– Colt was the first data centre operator in Europe to be awarded the M&O Stamp of Approval for operational excellence and its Tier III Design certification.

– Colt’s data centre services are built around business efficiency, through award-winning and agile processes that optimise performance, save energy and reduce upfront cost.

– Colt’s data centres are carrier neutral, but customers also have the choice of using Colt’s network – providing them with a one-stop-shop for a range of services.

– Its flexible approach provides capacity on-demand, aligns to customer’s business requirements and delivers unparalleled operational and energy efficiencies.

– Its data centres have high power efficiency – an industry-leading PUE of 1.21.

 

10. TelecityGroup

TelecityGroup is thought to be Europe’s largest provider of premium carrier-neutral data centres, by revenue, operating 37 facilities in city locations across Europe, supporting more than 5,000 customer contracts in total from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Its industry excellence has been recognised by numerous independent organisations, in the last 12 months alone it has received Capacity Magazine’s Global Carrier Award for best data centre and BroadGroup’s Colocation Provider of the Year award. It continues to expand throughout Europe, most recently into Sofia and Warsaw, and is home to more than 400 carriers.

At a glance:

– TelecityGroup says it is the fourth biggest UK tech company (behind ARM, SAGE and Invensys)

– Its CEO Michael Tobin was recognised this year with an OBE for "services to the Digital Economy".

– In the UK, TelecityGroup has seven London data centres located in prime, geographically diverse London locations and four of the most resilient, highly connected data centres in Manchester.

– TelecityGroup’s approach to carbon management ranges from driving accountability in the data centre industry -publicising long-term and clear carbon management targets – to implementing new cutting edge technologies to minimise the environmental impact of its operations. Its commitment to this issue saw it play a major role in the recent Climate Change Agreement passed in the UK and became the first data centre provider to set transparent energy efficiency targets, committing to achieving continuous improvement of at least 3% in Group CUE per annum from 2011.

11. Digital Realty

Digital Realty supports companies of all sizes across the financial services, cloud and IT services, manufacturing, energy, gaming and life sciences industries. It has a portfolio of five UK data centres in Chessington, Redhill, Croydon, Woking and planned Crawley site (2015).

At a glance:

– With a market cap of more than $8bn, Digital Realty is one of the few UK operating data centre companies that gives customers the security of knowing they will have a provider for life.

– Digital Realty data centres are designed, built and operated by professionals with decades of experience in site selection, design and construction, engineering, operations and customer service.

– Digital’s proprietary global relationships with major contractors and suppliers could improve efficiencies and reduce customers’ time to market.

– Digital Realty has invested into dark fibre rings in the London metro area, connecting its data centres. This has enabled customers to realise significant cost savings and implement their solutions quickly and easily, allowing for swift execution of services.

12. Ark Data Centres

Unlike some other data centre providers Ark Data Centres is not a property firm or real estate investment trust (REIT) that is bound by accounting rules. A privately owned business, Ark is able to take a long-term view of its customers’ genuine IT infrastructure needs, and is not distracted by the need to balance quarterly capital expenditure.

Ark claims to have the most efficient data centres on the planet. In its customer contracts, Ark was the first data centre provider to guarantee PUE – and others follow in its footsteps. Data rooms are different sizes and many data centre providers quote their PUE on just that room. Ark quotes everything. Literally the whole building. Because if a customer is paying for part of it, then it’s part of their PUE overhead.

At a glance:

– Ark says it can save customers more than £1.2m and more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon annually, compared with an average data centre facility – lowering the total cost of ownership across the industry.

– Part of Ark’s ‘secret sauce’ is with its unique approach to cooling. Highly sophisticated ‘matching technology’ is sampling customers’ equipment every millisecond, and can instantly detect any change in cooling requirements.

– Ark sites use permeable road surfaces that look like block paving, that capture rainfall and stores it in balancing ponds. An osmosis plant then converts that to pure water for use in Ark’s cooling process, thus reducing its demand on the main water supply.

– In an industry where it’s not unusual for businesses to wait 12 months or more for a new data centre build to be complete, Ark has shown that once the concrete is down it can do it in 12 weeks.

13. Interxion

London-based Interxion is a provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral colocation data centre services in Europe, supporting over 1,400 customers through 37 data centres across 11 countries. Their state-of-the-art facilities provide space, power and cooling with reliability and performance that ensure to go beyond industry standards. Furthermore, with more than 500 Connectivity providers and 20 European Internet exchanges, Interxion has created cloud, content, finance and connectivity hubs that foster growing customer communities of interest.

At a glance:

– Because Interxion are carrier-neutral, they provide access to more than 500 connectivity providers, ISPs and Internet Exchange providers already located in the data centres.

– Interxion’s data centres are located in near-city centre locations (such as Brick Lane in London), giving customers direct and low-latency access to Europe’s leading business and residential centres.

– Maintained around the clock by experienced and highly trained technicians, all 37 data centres are built and operated to the same exacting designs and processes.

– Constantly looking to optimise energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions and cut waste, 90% of Interxion’s power comes from sustainable sources, including water, solar and wind.

14. Telehouse

Telehouse has recently announced that construction of its new data centre, North Two, will soon begin in London’s Docklands. This will be a next-generation data centre that will provide a new site for a new Internet, according to Telehouse, giving UK businesses the digital infrastructure to take advantage of an internet increasingly driven by cloud computing, apps, smartphones and tablets.

At a glance:

– Telehouse has 25 years of industry experience, longer than any other European provider, and founded Europe’s first purpose built data centre in 1990.

– The company is already the home of the London internet Exchange (LINX), facilitating the majority of its capacity on its Docklands campus, dealing with the huge proportion of UK Internet traffic that goes through LINX.

– Telehouse operates 42 data centres worldwide, with four in London, soon to rise to 5 with the construction of North Two

15. Gyron

Founded in March 2000, Gyron provides highly resilient and energy-efficient data centre services, supporting business critical IT applications for customers across the world. The company offers colocation on both a wholesale and retail basis, along with associated connectivity and management services, all supported by comprehensive 100% availability Service Level Guarantees. Gyron’s customers include enterprises such as Adobe, Symantec and Spotify.

In 2012, Gyron became part of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), a global leader in ICT solutions, in order to strengthen NTT’s global cloud service offering. Vince Cable endorsed this merger by commenting that it made the UK "the ICT hub of Europe". Gyron currently has five state-of-the-art data centre facilities in the South East of England and is due to open another site in 2015, UK Hemel Hempstead 3, to meet the growing demand for scalable and reliable colocation services. The new facility will start providing approximately 10,000m2 of server room, expanding NTT Com’s total server room area in the UK by 2.5 times.

At a glance:

– Hemel Hempstead 3 will use advanced green technology, which means the facility will achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of under 1.2. The facility further reduces NTT Com’s environmental load by using rain water in the air conditioning, generating electricity from solar panels, and using heat from the server equipment to warm office areas in the winter.

– Customers of note include Spotify, Symantec, Adobe and Verisign.

– Gyron’s data centre sites strengthen NTT Com’s cloud-based one-stop ICT solutions in the UK and enable the group to further accelerate its increasingly diverse global cloud services offering.

– In 2014, NTT Com was awarded Data Centre Investor of the Year at the International Data Centre and Cloud Awards.

16. Capgemini

Capgemini is at the forefront of data centre innovation launching Merlin, one of the world’s most energy efficient and sustainable data centres, in September 2010 and has won multiple awards for its revolutionary and innovative approach to cooling.

The company used a ‘smart design’ with sustainability at its core, creating a modular data centre and an operational model that allows Merlin to use minimise power usage as well as increase efficiently. With Merlin, Capgemini has created a facility that is flexible and responsive, allowing it to cope with the fast-changing data management needs of the future.

Merlin is a model that should allow future data centres to be built to be more sustainable, efficient, more easily located and make high-end data management services accessible to a wider range of organisations and enterprises. Merlin is more cost effective to implement than traditional data centres, minimises CapEx and reduces running costs, generating savings for Capgemini’s clients.

At a glance:

– Capgemini has produced one of the world’s most efficient and sustainable data centres in Merlin

– It takes a fresh approach to data centre design

– Capgemini has won multiple awards for its approach to cooling

– It designs data centres that are flexible and responsive enough to cope with data management needs in the long-term future

– Capgemini is helping to reduce the costs to implement data centres, reduce CapEx and running costs and generate savings for the end client

17. NaviSite

NaviSite specialises in cloud and managed hosting services. It operates two data centres in Woking and Redhill (plus nine data centres in the US). Both UK data centres have multiple levels of physical security, including independently audited security controls and globally centralised Security NOC monitoring ensuring customer security. Data centre building entrance requires advanced notice, government ID’s, mandatory visitor registration, visitor escorts, and employee badge access. NaviSite’s strict security measures ensure a reliable, safe environment for businesses. Since connectivity is key, NaviSite’s data centres have 100% connection uptime and excellent response times for hosted business applications and servers.

In addition to security, NaviSite’s data centres are powered through highly redundant and efficient systems backed by generators that can keep the site fully operational at full load for 24 hours with hot-refuel capability, without any power from the electric grid. Every data centre is completely equipped with data-grade HVAC systems with N+1 redundancy for regulating air temperature and humidity where equipment resides, ensuring longer life and continuous operations for equipment. As a member of THE GREEN GRID, NaviSite ensures its data centres minimise power consumption. By deploying energy-efficient technologies like virtualisation and using energy-efficient servers, storage, and networking equipment, NaviSite’s equipment and proprietary monitoring software cut energy consumption of its cooling systems by more than 20%.

At a glance:

– Both Woking and Redhill data centres are SSAE-16 compliant and have accreditation at the data centre level for – ISO27001 (Information Security Management; ISO14001 (Environmental Management) and ISO9001 (Quality Management).

– Awarded a place on UK Government G-Cloud III programme.

– Fully trained on site 24 x7 Smarthands Staff supporting customer needs and emergencies.

– Each Data Centre Hall has its own dedicated power plant providing multiple redundant data center environments in each location.

– 24 x7 Global Facilities Monitoring System ensuring any issues are immediately addressed and ensuring 100% facilities uptime for our customers.

18. Rackspace

Rackspace, the managed cloud company, is a specialist in hybrid cloud, and aims to provide each customer with the best fit for individual use cases. The company is the founder innovator of OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds.

Rackspace’s data centre network spans the globe supporting nine data centres located in six regions. Extending from Australia to Hong Kong and the UK with a group located across North America, the Rackspace family is now being augmented with a new UK location being built in association with the Digital Realty Trust. It is thought that the new Crawley Data Centre will be the first in the UK to make use of innovative ‘indirect outside air’ cooling technology on this scale. Eco-credentials here are high as the facility works without mechanical cooling, meaning that the energy required to operate the data centre will be reduced by 80%. The use of green technologies that create a positive PUE score of 1.17 or less is testament to both Digital Realty’s and Rackspace’s full endorsement of the new ASHRAE guidelines.

At a glance:

– Rackspace’s managed service model is designed to give businesses and developers the help they need to design, manage, scale and grow their cloud operations.

– Award-winning Fanatical Support, meaning companies can concentrate on giving their customers the best experience possible, without having to worry about managing their data. Customers also on the managed service level have double SLA credits.

– Rackspace’s new developer+ programme provides an infrastructure credit for a package of cloud services for a limited time. It is designed for developers who want to stay fast and lean and focus their engineering talent on building their app, rather than swelling their payroll with engineers who manage IT operations that don’t differentiate their business

– Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack, an open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. OpenStack provides both large and small businesses an alternative to closed cloud environments, reducing the risks of lock-in proprietary platforms.

 

19. City Lifeline

City Lifeline claims to be the second longest established data centre in the UK, having operated continuously on its current site as a data centre since 1993. October will mark its 21st birthday. The data centre is located in Shoreditch, right in the heart of the Tech City area only a few hundred yards from Silicon Roundabout itself. No other data centre is right in the centre of the dynamic and constantly evolving white-hot technology area which is at the heart of Europe’s economic growth

At a glance:

– City Lifeline is one of the best connected data centres in both London and the UK, with 24 carriers having a permanent presence in the data centre and access to another 200 or so via City Lifeline’s own dedicated dark fibre connections

– City Lifeline operates to Tier 3 level, with concurrent maintainability a priority and continuity of service guaranteed at all times, even in the event of maintenance or failure

– City Lifeline says it has some of the best support of any London data centre, with processes and procedures that have been refined over many years to ensure unrivalled customer satisfaction when things go right as well as wrong.

20. Timico

Unlike many data centre providers, Timico doesn’t just have its own data centre, but its own MPLS core network too. The relationship between the network, the data centre and telephony is becoming mutually dependent, so having your own network is an undisputable advantage.

Being completely independent, Timico isn’t restricted to ‘off the shelf’ solutions. These days differentiation comes from building bespoke solutions using elements of IP telephony, hosting, mobility and connectivity to make your offering stand head and shoulders above the rest.

At a glance:

– Timico has its own Tier 3 data centre. Safe, secure and equipped with its own onsite Network Operations Centre and full ISO27001 accreditation in Newark, Nottinghamshire.

– That means Timico can cut out a lot of the red tape you’d find with other providers. We’ve struck the perfect balance between being big enough to be a safe pair of hands, but independent enough to offer the best deals for our customers.

– Timico has a number of well-established relationships with trusted industry partners – from Cisco and VMWare to Dell and Zerto – which means we can resell and support a huge number of customers and applications.

21. Xerox

A name you might not have expected to see in this list. But document management specialist Xerox has established one of the world’s largest business process outsourcing businesses, and manages this through 18 data centres around the world.
Its state-of-the-art, 1,300m2 centre in Telford boasts some of the greenest credentials in Europe, with multiple ISO accreditations including 9001, 14001, 27001 and 20000. Designed for ITILv3 compliance, and featuring a modular design of cold-aisle containment and heat exchange, it is able to save 4,200 tonnes of carbon annually compared to sites of a similar size.

With 6,000 employees dedicated to IT Outsourcing, Xerox supports 350,000 desktops and 28,000 servers for its customers, around a third of which are managed remotely. From here, Xerox provides access to secure cloud services. This site is the first Xerox data centre to be fully PCI-DSS compliant giving automatic credit card transaction security for millions of online retail customers. For the company’s government clients, Xerox is an accredited supplier on the G-Cloud procurement framework.