Liverpool technology company, AIMES Grid Services, has today announced a partnership with Warrington-based Xicon, an independent IT solutions and managed services provider. The agreement enables both companies to offer a highly cost effective and efficient business continuity and disaster recovery service based on a virtual cloud computing infrastructure.

The partnership, which was presented to customers in the North West at a launch event in Warrington, combines the core strengths of each business. Xicon, a server virtualisation specialist, has worked with AIMES to create a shared virtual server platform with a large data storage capacity. This allows clients to replicate their servers into a private ‘cloud', providing them with an affordable, managed off-site data backup solution. The service will be hosted by AIMES at its ISO27001 certified, energy efficient data centre facility at Liverpool Innovation Park. AIMES will also be providing secure network connectivity to client sites.

Simon Heyes, managing director, Xicon Limited said: "Due to the demands and pressures to keep systems up and running even in the event of a disaster, businesses throughout the North West are faced with the technical challenges and financial burden of providing their own business continuity solutions.

"Virtualisation provides a great opportunity for organisations to take a more flexible approach to business continuity, while sharing infrastructure makes these services much more cost effective."

Professor Dennis Kehoe, chief executive of AIMES, commented: "As a not-for-profit business with a reputation for innovation, we constantly look for new technologies that will help us to make professional and secure disaster recovery solutions more affordable for our customers. Partnering with Xicon to exploit the benefits of cloud computing has enabled us to do just that at a time when businesses in the North West are crying out for increased data storage capacity."

The term ‘cloud computing' is widely used within the IT industry to refer to the concept of accessing IT-related resources via the internet (or ‘the cloud' as it is often known). Online goliaths Google and Amazon are among the companies already offering open access cloud computing to customers which enable users to consume resources as a service and pay on a per usage basis rather than having to buy, install and manage their own IT infrastructure.

Private clouds, such as the one created by the Xicon and AIMES partnership, are believed by many in the industry, including leading IT research firm Gartner, to be the future of corporate IT.

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