Faster and reliable connectivity gained prominence during the pandemic. But along with the need for increased capacity came a heightened focus on cybersecurity and data breaches. For organizations looking for safe, secure, and reliable services, Segra provides a one-stop shop for fiber and managed services for its customers.

But what makes Segra different from other data centers? Read on.

While there are numerous data centers in the Eastern US, Segra is a regional leader, offering high-availability data center services throughout the mid-Atlantic. Not only because of its impressive network, data centers and products, but also its exceptional customer service, Segra is unmatched in the industry.

One of the largest independent fiber infrastructure bandwidth companies in the Eastern US, Segra owns and operates an advanced fiber infrastructure network throughout nine Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states.

Segra offers wavelength, Ethernet, MPLS, dark fiber, advanced data center services, IP, VPN, managed services, voice, and cloud solutions, all backed by its industry-leading service and reliability. Its prominent customers include carriers, enterprises, governments, higher education, and healthcare organizations.

Focusing exclusively on enterprise services, Segra offers high-availability data center services throughout the region including in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, South and North Carolina, and Georgia. With direct connectivity from the Segra fiber footprint, along with ample options for connectivity, Segra’s data centers are uniquely positioned to offer clients on-net data center and colocation services.

Segra's data centers are directly connected to the company’s extensive fiber network, and house, maintain, and protect mission-critical servers and data for its customers.

The enterprise-class facilities in Charlotte, NC, for example, are staffed 24x7x365, are SSAE 16 SOC 2 Type II certified, and PCI DSS and HIPAA compliant. In addition to colocation, enterprise services include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Storage as a Service (STaaS), and Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS), and Backup as a Service (BaaS).

“Segra's Charlotte data center acts as a carrier hotel,” said Segra CEO Kevin T Hart, “with 12 of the largest carriers in Charlotte having fiber routes and points of presence (POP) within its facilities, allowing robust, cost-effective options for clients."

Segra offers fiber-based end-to-end connectivity solutions, security, collaboration, voice services, and wireless backup. This is in addition to data center colocation and cloud services products, IaaS, DRaaS, and BaaS.

Remote work continues to be the order of the day, with companies continuing to enable remote workers – a shift ignited by the pandemic and currently an accepted norm. Companies are no longer mandating their employees work onsite, nor do they want on-premises data centers. So, companies are seeking data center space that can run their workloads.

Enter Segra with its multipurpose solutions and broad range of cutting-edge technology.

"Colocation takes the worry out of managing a facility. We offer audit compliance, power, cooling, 24x7x365 staffing with Segra full-time employees, as well as physical security for colocation customers," said Hart.

Cloud products are gaining momentum as companies shift critical data onto the cloud. Companies can run their traditional workloads in the Segra Cloud and take advantage of Segra's hypervisor management, OS management, SIEM service, immutable Backup and Restoration, and Disaster Recovery services.

With many companies seeking out the low network latency between data centers to meet the requirements of their applications such as IoT (Internet of Things) applications, stretch clustering, and active application architecture, Segra data centers offer extremely low latency with few hops on their data center network fabric. And with their Express Cloud Access product, they can offer connectivity to public cloud providers for companies choosing to run a hybrid cloud architecture.

When asked about the challenges faced by customers, Hart acknowledged that many companies are facing staffing issues like recruiting and retention during the current 'war for talent'. However, by opting to move out of their company-owned facility, organizations no longer need to retain the staff to run a data center. By subscribing to cloud services, customers no longer have the burden of managing the underlying hardware, hypervisor, and OS, so their team members can focus on the applications serving their enterprises and customers.

With the issue of where to house company data mitigated, another daunting challenge remains. Ransomware and other cyber security breaches represent one of the most prominent issues of working in a connected world and a key concern that keeps CIOs up at night.

Organizations suffer significant financial losses and damaged reputations at the hand of ransomware and data breaches. This is one of the reasons a reliable data center partner like Segra is vital to companies of all sizes in any industry.

Segra provides an integrated managed services platform to help alert customers of potential threats and provide disaster recovery services to recover from ransomware attacks quickly.

With the predictive alert, companies can safeguard their servers. Segra's data centers offer peace of mind amid the threats of security breaches or natural and man-made disasters.

With a deep understanding of risk management, Segra's team of experts partner closely with organizations to meet the growing challenges of doing business in the digital age.

Elaborating on the company’s role as a partner and advocate for its customers, Hart said, "At Segra, we deliver standardized solutions with diversity, redundancy, and scalability in mind, all backed by a strong fiber backbone. We have an experienced team of engineers with diverse backgrounds coming from many different industries who collaborate to build solutions to meet the specific needs of the enterprises we serve. We host customers from various industries like education, finance, health care, law firms, construction, retail, and technology."

He added that product highlights include Tier-3 and Tier-4 class data centers, including space, power, and environmental management. Customers have direct, resilient access to Segra's super-regional fiber footprint and network services. And Segra provides 24x7x365 monitoring by the Segra Network Operations Center for all their data centers.

Segra is a partner, advocate, and network connector providing secure and accessible data storage and retrieval for colocation, along with IaaS, BaaS, and DRaaS solutions.

To summarize, Segra provides responsive customer services, unmatched in the industry, and is both nimble and flexible, able to scale services to support customers as they grow.

When we inquired about case studies, Hart said, "With our unique menu of managed services and strength of our fiber network backbone in addition to our data centers, Segra enables enterprise partners to overcome hurdles daily. Three customers come to mind."

The first is a mid-size healthcare provider out of Wilmington, NC.  Located between Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, their data centers were constantly impacted by hurricanes. Segra worked with them to provide a custom disaster recovery solution that is a hybrid of their DRaaS and colocation products. The customer has deployed a third-party appliance to replicate medical imaging files from their data center in the hurricane zone to Segra's inland facility. The customer also replicated all their virtual machines to Segra's DRaaS platform. In a disaster, the team of experts at Segra failover all their virtual machines to run in Charlotte and point those machines to the secondary image store in the customer's colocation space.  

The second one is a regional law firm. With multiple offices across a geographic footprint that extends the length of the eastern United States, from Maine and Michigan down to Florida and nearly every state in between, the large firm subscribes to a wide array of services to power its regional practice. Segra provides many services, including colocation, IaaS, BaaS, DRaaS, hosted firewall, and L3 VPN interconnected to the customer's offices via fiber-connected MPLS or SD-WAN with wireless LTE backup. This law firm has entrusted Segra with its business. They are also a long-term customer that has referred several other law firms to Segra based on the excellent service and support they receive.

And the third customer example is one of the world's largest emergency response and environmental remediation providers. It is not only a data center colo customer, but its family of companies count on Segra for additional services, which include IaaS, DRaaS, hosted firewall, connectivity, voice, and much more. This customer utilizes almost every service Segra offers and enlists Segra to deliver secondary circuits to their larger sites. When they have a new network or data center, cloud, or security requirement, Segra is the first organization engaged to engineering the best solution.

"Segra is the largest independent fiber company in the eastern U.S.; we've got a best-in-class next-gen network, and business Internet connectivity is at our core. We are small enough to be agile with unmatched customer service and nimbly customer-focused to customize services to meet our customers' needs. On the flip side, we are an independently operating subsidiary of Cox Communications backed by Cox's buying power," said Hart.

“Segra has its fiber network and data centers, interconnected via fiber path diversity,” he explained. “They can add managed services to continue to help their customers to scale their businesses.”

Hart added, "We have a saying at Segra, we help provide our customers freedom to grow, so we're there to invest in their future.”

Segra's world-class data centers meet the strictest industry standards. They are compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). All Segra facilities are SSAE 16 SOC 2 Type II-certified and are monitored continuously. Additionally, as one of the largest independent fiber infrastructure bandwidth companies in the eastern U.S., Segra can provide customers with the fiber connectivity they require between their offices to reach our data centers.

Another key point of differentiation is that Segra has an immediate Tier 3 Engineer engaged in all DR incident response scenarios. This helps save time when mitigating risks.

The Segra Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform takes the headache out of customer-managed server environments by hosting customer data in one of its secured data centers. Connected via Segra's private fiber network into its 24/7/365 staffed, highly available data centers, our customers can leverage all the compute and storage resources needed to run critical applications. Segra's IaaS comes in two forms, a multi-tenant cloud offering for clients requiring minimal resources and a private cloud offering for customers requiring more dedicated resources.

Segra's Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS) combines a powerful and scalable Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. Along with our dedicated cybersecurity team, customers have visibility and actionable intelligence in real-time across their entire network. It reduces risk and exposure, enabling customers to act quickly before the spread of an attack and without the need for personnel investment, management, and maintenance.

Additionally, providing an industry-leading, multi-layered approach to Security, Segra Hosted Firewall services work together to eliminate or reduce the risks associated with blended attacks while coordinating security alerting, logging, reporting, compliance, and response. The Hosted Firewall service applies security policies to all Internet traffic traversing a customer's network.

Looking Ahead

Speaking about the future, Hart shared that Segra continues to look at ways to expand its offerings, whether through strategic growth that adds to its data center geographical footprint or with additional technologies in the data center space, such as container orchestration or Desktop as a Service (DaaS), as well as offerings in the managed services arena such as SASE deployments and security as a Service (SECaaS).

Segra continues to grow as one of the largest independent fiber infrastructure bandwidth companies in the Eastern U.S. It owns and operates an advanced fiber infrastructure network throughout nine Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states. Segra provides wavelength, Ethernet, MPLS, dark fiber, advanced data center services, IP, VPN, managed services, voice and cloud solutions, all backed by its industry-leading service and reliability. With a robust team of experts and state-of-the-art technology, Segra offers its clients the confidence and connectivity to achieve their dreams.