Capitoline advocates Data Centre Security Management Compliance for the Financial Sector

Capitoline LLP, an independent specialist engineering and management consultancy, and KITS Technologiesa data Centre Infrastructure service provider recently held a Data Centre Seminar in Nigeria.

According to Taofeek Okoya, director of Business and Strategy at Kits Technologies while making a business case for the financial sector said that Data Centre Security Management Compliance does not end in Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI- DSS) alone.

Corroborating this statement Barry Elliott, a founding partner of Capitoline, said that Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI- DSS) and a couple of other standards must be constantly demonstrated by any Company (or Company Data Centre) that wishes to share financial information, and in particular credit card information, with other organisations.

In addition, he said: “All industries and corporations now rely upon Information Technology for the success and very survival of their business and none more so than the finance sector of the economy.

Financial industries have particular requirements put upon them for the security of their data and physical assets, ability to back up their data and an audit trail of transactions. In some areas of the world legislation has been passed to force financial institutions to demonstrate this required level of security and backup.

In Europe there is the Basel II Accord and the EU Data Retention Directive and in the USA the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and accountability Act and the Gramm-Leach Billey Act.

Other countries have a mixture of Regulations and Best Practice recommendations e.g. Threat Vulnerability and Risk Assessment (TVRA), Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs: Guidelines for Enhancing Building Security in Singapore (GEBSS): 2010 and from the UK the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure (CPNI) Protection of Data Centres Guidelines.”
In order to ensure the Nigerian financial sector is carried along in this compliance drive, a certification Data Centre training was done for data Centre managers and IT heads of banks, insurance and oil and gas companies.

All the family of standards that cover both the physical and design aspects and the operational management aspects of data centres were made apparent. Among them are ISO/IEC 27002:2005 and TIA 942 amongst others.

No one standard meets all requirements and occasionally there are composite standards in the market place such as the AMS-IX Business Continuity Management standard for data centres, hence there is strong need by the IT, Data Centre and Infrastructure managers for constant knowledge update and compliance to these standards.

Capitoline LLP, an independent specialist engineering and management consultancy, has been providing design, audit and training services to the data centre industry in Nigeria.

Capitoline is the market leader in data centre auditing with over 70,000 m2 of data centre floor space accounting for more than 150 data centres audited from Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia.

Capitoline introduced the first manufacturer-independent data centre training package in 2005 and now offers an industry-standard data centre Professional qualification (DCP), a unique data centre design qualification (DCD) and Operational Management qualification, DCOM. The next certification training comes up in Lagos in November 2013.