Business continuity at OVHcloud is a key pilar of our ambition and lies at the heart of our resilience strategy rooted in the company’s fundamentals.
This translates into structuring, implementing and managing the Business Continuity Management System (BCMS). OVHcloud’s BCMS solves for different scenarios that can occur following a disruption and is declined according to the various types of impact and their level of severity.
To come up with these connections, we rely on the regulatory, market, organizational and sectoral requirements of the organization. We also take into account products and services peculiarities, the offered services, used processes, and of course the expectations and requirements of our stakeholders of which you are part of as our customers.
OVHcloud’s ambition is clear: obtaining the ISO22301 certification that will serve as a recognition of the organization’s reliability.
How does BCMS translate at OVHcloud?
BCMS is all about:
- Commitment from the management team
- Definition of business continuity goals
- Operational and maintenance of processes, capabilities and response structures to ensure all OVHcloud services will withstand any disruptions,
- Regular monitoring and review of BCMS performance and efficiency,
- Continuous improvements based on qualitative and quantitative measures,
Who are the actors and drivers of business continuity at OVHcloud?
Everybody! Indeed, it’s a companywide collective approach where all departments and players make a contribution. Each OVHcloud employee is responsible, committed and acts as a business continuity advocate to deliver customers the best service.
Three items are key to engage with staff to drive and achieve expected results:
- Committed and involved management
- Ambitious strategy and goals
- A team comprised of business continuity experts.
What are the main themes to consider when working on resilience abilities?
- Industrial risks and physical security
- Network
- Resilience and securing solutions and products
As part of this process, we worked on revamping our fire prevention and protection plan via a strategy and a corporate objective: to be “Hyper Resilient”. The company has defined it will deploy measures to achieve a level of excellence and reference, surpassing the industry standards when it comes to fire risk prevention and protection.
How OVHcloud is planning to reinforce its fire prevention policy?
Three strong commitments have been taken by OVHcloud and are part of projects being deployed:
- Generalization of automatic extinguishing on all sites, without distinction, along with additional and reinforced measures compared to recognized certifications that are APSAD and NFPA. When it comes to extinguishing, our goal is not only to answer a said standard or label but to offer the maximum protection to customers.
- Strengthening compartmentalization for all areas of our datacenters regardless of activity by increasing fire rating of all infrastructures and by reducing spaces. Being a key element of fire protection, compartmentalization is implemented in all our datacenters.
- Management facilities and power supply, including batteries, have been moved away from the core of the datacenter with creation of outside infrastructures aside from the data storage building.
What is the plan?
OVHcloud’s goal is to finish work related to automatic extinguishers before end of 2023 for all sites, including strengthened compartmentalization. Strasbourg’s datacenter (SBG5) is the proof: its operations will start on Wednesday July 6th 2022. SBG5, our new last generation datacenter benefits from OVHcloud’s new standards from the “Hyper Resilient” program:
- Ultra-secured surface of 1700m2,
- 19 independent rooms with 2 hours fire compartments (using concrete)
- 7 power rooms and 3 batteries room located outside of the main building, the latest hosting server rooms, telecommunications and network,
- Double “VESDA” detection installed in compliance with APSAD R7 requirements,
- Redundant gas extinguishing system in compliance with APSAD R13 requirements,
- OVHcloud water cooling technology,
- Water reserve of 120 m3 in addition to the water public network,
- Collaborative work with the institutions and more specifically the SDIS67 fire department to analyze and take into accounts all risks,
On the existing sites, work is being organized around the reorganization of physical spaces (including sealing and compartmentalization) but also the setup of new energy and battery rooms to move devices further away. Fire detection systems are overhauled with the “VESDA” dual fire detection systems and the installation of gas extinguishing systems.
We aim to favor gas extinguishing systems, in order to allow for the quickest possible restart of the activity in the event of an incident. Where gas extinguishing will not be possible, we will opt for sprinkler based extinguishing solutions but with specific features to reinforce service continuity. We will use so called pre-action systems that keep the extinguishing network out of water in order to avoid leaks and accidental triggering.
We will soon share delivery dates of these installations on a site-by-site basis, giving you full visibility on the roll out of our Hyper Resilient protection program.
OVHcloud is fully committed in maintaining business continuity of its services and infrastructures.
Our next blog will be about the resilience of Network@OVHcloud.
Chief Resilience Officer