Edinburgh Airport selects Onyx datacentre for 'expertise and local presence'

Edinburgh Airport has selected cloud service provider Onyx Group to host its mission-critical IT infrastructure in a £3m deal because of its "speed to market and local presence", according to the airport's head of IT, Graeme Agnew.

The airport was sold by operator BAA to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) at the end of May. As a result of the sale, Edinburgh Airport has to move its systems from BAA's main IT facility in Heathrow to a new datacentre.

The five-year deal to with Onyx was also part of an overarching strategy of the airport to reduce costs and improve the quality of services, Agnew told Computing.

"Our key strategy has been to look at the cost of IT, and at the quality of services that IT delivers both from day to day service delivery but more importantly to ensure that IT has got the right capabilities so that it can inject value into the business plan of the airport," he said.

The airport opened a tender process to look at a number of vendors that specialised in offsite hosting and selected Onyx for several reasons.

"We made a strategic decision not to use Edinburgh Airport to host our backend IT infrastructure, because we wanted a high visibility datacentre capability, run by someone who is an expert in that field," said Agnew.

"We selected Onyx both because of its capability and speed to market to deliver our infrastructure requirements on target, as well as having a local presence in Edinburgh, meaning that although it's hosted offsite, the datacentre is still nearby," he said.