'Swiss' data vault plan gathers support

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

A plan to set up a world data security centre, or "a Swiss bank vault", for global data in New Zealand, is gathering support.

The idea, nicknamed Project Rock, is being promoted by information technology consultant Gary Connolly of The Digital Agenda and backed by Telecom-owned Advanced Solutions.

Mr Connolly said the data centre would be built and operated by a conglomerate group of "equal partners" and would consist of five diverse data centres that would store archival data securely on behalf of international and local customers.

"We do not want to be competing with other groups who may be trying to do the same thing; for this reason we will be opening our doors as widely as possible," he said.

So far, representatives from Auckland University-owned Uniservices, Massey University, Telecom, Information Technology Minister Paul Swain's office, and the New Zealand Defence Forces, as well as several data centre providers and IT security firms, have attended initial discussions on the project.

Mr Connolly believed New Zealand's remoteness would be a strategic advantage in a security context.

While terrorists could theoretically fly into and launch attacks within the country, he said, the distributed nature of the proposed data centre would make it difficult to find a physical site to target.

It is envisaged the data centre would be protected from cyberterrorist threats by onion-like layers of encryption and other security measures he did not want to discuss.

"By the time you get to the data you would have already proved who you are," he said.

Mr Connolly also argued that latency, or transmission delays over long distances, would not be an issue with archival data.

"Because it's a data vault, it is non-transactional by its very nature.

"We would be awful as an application service provider because that latency would kill it, but this would be data that was being archived."

John Houlker, ICT sector specialist at Industry New Zealand, said the broad thrust of the plan went further than just a data vault.

"It's a three-legged approach that would include a data centre, internet security software, and security services. We are certainly trying to help these folks."

Market research firm IDC has predicted that the Asia Pacific internet data centre market will grow from $US713 million ($1.7 billion) last year to more than $US3.3 billion in 2005, but would be dominated by companies in Australia, Singapore and Korea.

Sue McCarty, acting general manager of esolutions, said she had not heard of the proposal, but she believed it was a positive move.

"I've always thought that there was a decent opportunity for New Zealand in this kind of data storage. It sounds very interesting."

But Jim Jericevich, northern regional general manager at Fujitsu, was less enthusiastic.

"It's a great idea, but from the business viability point of view it would be difficult to make it fly.

"If [the US market] wanted something like that they would do it themselves, in Nevada or some place like that."

Mr Connolly said further discussions would take place in the next two weeks and interested parties should e-mail him at: garyc@agenda.co.nz.