Daisy Group has opened a 12 tonne bomb proof door to its Manchester data centre for the media to have a snuffle around. The company has recently completed a £1m investment programme in the subterranean facility, situated within a former Bank of England bullion vault.

This investment has been used to improve Daisy’s infrastructure, increase network capacity and launch its CloudSelectTM, computing-on-demand. For some reason being bomb-proof is at the centre of that. The system is 25 feet below ground, the data centre’s raft of security features also includes two metre thick granite walls and a 60 centimetre bomb blast corridor surrounding the data storage area. It is continuously monitored by 70 CCTV cameras and access is granted only to authorised personnel.

The company said that millions of pounds worth of transactions take place online every day and it is facilities like its that make this possible. The data centre has an uninterrupted power supply and has three standby diesel generators, which would be triggered in the event of a power failure. It also uses six air conditioning units to ensure the temperature is kept at an optimum level. In addition the data centre is tier III, ISO 27001 accredited and monitored 24/7 by Daisy’s highly skilled engineers.

The Manchester data centre is one of four that Daisy operates across the UK, the others being located in London Docklands, Southampton and Jersey.  All centres are connected to Daisy’s national fibre network, which delivers superior bandwidth to give faster response times. There is also access to a variety of additional network security services, ensuring Daisy can protect customer data from any unforeseen attacks.