Latvia – a powerful IT country – it is not only a vision!

Latvia is positioning itself abroad as a powerful IT country. Now we can argue this position, as quite soon, in Riga, the biggest data center in the Baltics called „Riga” will be opened. It belongs to IT outsourcing company DEAC.

In order to describe a bit the scale of the project, we can note that server room area only is colossal. Starting with 200 RACKs for the first round and other 300 RACKs for the second round, as well as the opportunity to enlarge up to several thousands square meters. Certainly, an area that is so large and powerful, needs conformed powerful communications, electricity and security provision, all of which is accordingly provided.

For the past couple of months most of the mass media were reporting the crisis in the latvian business, that economy is experiencing rapid degression. But it is not so.  IT branch is one of those rare branches, which is experiencing noticable growth, while at the same time it is one of the first to suffer from regularly increasing electricity prices. Today DEAC is spending more than 10 000 LVL a month to cover electricity bills to provide data security for the latvian companies.

Thanks to the rapid technology development and switch-over to electronic office environment, IT branch is not lacking business, what can not be said about qualified personnel. Businessmen become more educated and more open to the new technologies. They start understanding, how the technologies can help in their everyday work and achieve their business goals. They are willing to find out how they can save financial resources by using IT services. Similar situation with government institutions, which start to base their working process on the modern technologies.

The new data center, which is currently under construction, is a seriuos declaration in IT field for all the Baltic States. The data center services can be used by any company – irrespective of its size or field of business. IT companies as well, can use the new data center as a technical support to ensure the quality of provided services. Latvia today is only beginning its journey towards IT power capacity, that is why it is unlikely that the area of the new data center will be filled using latvian resources only. Therefore DEAC is planning to work with foreign markets.

„Although we are living in 21st century, most of the latvian companies do not care much about their business. There are companies, which are creating their data backup copies on a floppy disk or do not create the backup at all. Still happens, that some company has lost essential data during fire or a server with important business data was stolen from an office. What can be done with that? Nothing! All is lost and beyond retrieval. That’s the case the data centers are made for – a place, where to store servers, where they get appropriate climate conditions, using ventilation and cooling systems, where non-stop operation is provided by several power supply systems, such as UPS and diesel generators, as well as protecting them with firewalls and where constant system monitoring is in progress, to prevent any possible technical problems in the system,” that is how the necessity for the data centers are explained by DEAC CEO Andris Gailitis.

„Mine proposition to the government institutions: today, when the government sector has declared an overall saving mode, please, use the possibility provided by IT outsourcing companies! It will help to arrange IT infrastructure and most importantly, it will help to save financial resources,” continues A. Gailitis.