Former MI5 chief Baroness Manningham-Buller officiates at the launch of an Ark by Ark Data Centres, 17th November 2014

ARK, the leading provider of high integrity data centres, has officially launched its latest 36 acre Data Centre Campus at Cody Park in Farnborough, Hampshire. The first 4.5MW already built and selling fast, phase two building works are underway adding a further 9MW of capacity at the Cody Park Campus.

At the official opening for a select audience of industry leaders, former Director General of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, a Non-Executive Director of Ark, delivered a keynote speech where she explained why organisations, public and private, should take greater advantage of modern data centre leaders such as Ark with their capability to deliver significant efficiencies and real resilience. The Baroness later answered a wide-ranging set of questions on varied topics from the audience.

Welcoming the audience and Baroness Manningham-Buller to the launch of the new data centre campus was Huw Owen, CEO of Ark, who provided his thoughts on resilience and trust.

End to end resilience starts, he argued, with tenure of the land on which data centres are built – the absence of a landlord who can frustrate development – Ark controls its freeholds. Next, the necessary regulatory requirements must be in place. Power, cooling and fibre are key and Ark’s campus sites are rich and able in each. Indeed, Ark’s campus sites are carefully selected for their rich power sources, and their purpose built, highly efficient data centres offer the lowest TCO of any in the UK as a result. Then there is security; Ark operates up to BIL6 and delivers its standard offering to BIL3 at no greater cost to its clients. Finally, there is capital, the largest barrier to entry, and Ark with the backing of a US$21.9Bn fund comfortably clears that hurdle too.

Turning to the topic of trust Huw explained his view that trust is in essence the presence of competence, consistency and intimacy and the absence of obviously dominating self-interest. Trust is earnt over time but build on those foundations.

Ark demonstrates huge competence in what it does and now real consistency over an extended period of time and has clients happy to speak to those facts. Ultimately however, people do business with people. Intimacy in this sense (assuming that competence and consistence are present) is about doing business with people you feel comfortable with and Ark will always strive to be a company that people feel comfortable and want to do business with.

Lastly, there is self-interest which usually kills trust – Ark is in business for profit but will always aim to understand their clients’ businesses, place them at the centre of what Ark does and be a valued business partner. We aim to earn trust every day.

Huw Owen concluded: “We are very pleased that Baroness Manningham-Buller was able to join us for this official launch of our Cody Park Campus. We were equally delighted to be able to host clients and prospective clients and have opportunity to show them our latest offering. What was most gratifying was the incredibly positive feedback we received from those who attended. We have momentum, our cadence is building and there are truly exciting times ahead for Ark.”

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