Private Cloud Hosting & Management

In FirstNet data centres in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Your hosting and DR locations are confirmed in the solution design.

The baseline uses Veeam backups to immutable storage, so recovery points can't be changed or deleted until retention expires. Retention is sized to your needs, typically 7, 14 or 30 days.

Add Geographic Disaster Recovery. Workloads replicate to a second FirstNet data centre with reserved compute, memory and storage, a DR firewall and a failover runbook aligned to your agreed RTO and RPO.

No. You own your data, and an exit with secure deprovisioning and data handover is available under your contract.

FirstNet operates ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified management systems, which cover the platform. Compliance is shared, so your configuration, data classification and governance also shape the outcome.

FirstNet Private Cloud is a South African-hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform: a virtual data centre with virtual machines, compute, memory, tiered storage and segmented networking, without buying or running physical hardware. It runs on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V and is hosted in FirstNet data centres in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. A virtual firewall and immutable Veeam backups form the recommended baseline, and you can add disaster recovery to a second site and operating system management.

Yes. FirstNet Private Cloud runs on either VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, and you choose. Most organisations pick the hypervisor that matches their team's existing skills and the environment they are migrating from, which keeps the migration simpler. Your preference is captured in the discovery and sizing workshop, and it affects provisioning timelines together with your connectivity and firewall requirements.

There are three tiers, delivered on Infinidat enterprise storage arrays. Tier 1 is SSD flash for I/O-intensive workloads such as busy databases and latency-sensitive systems. Tier 2 is standard storage for general server workloads. Tier 3 is low-cost archive storage for data you rarely access. Each virtual machine can use the mix that suits it, and latency-sensitive workloads can move up to Tier 1 as your database estate grows.

They are part of the recommended baseline. A virtual firewall (Lite, or Enterprise with UTM) provides segmentation and controlled access, and Veeam backup jobs write to immutable storage, so recovery points can't be changed or deleted until retention expires. That makes the environment secure and recoverable by default. If you already have an approved alternative you can leave either one out, and FirstNet documents the responsibility split and your alternative security or recovery approach.

Retention is sized to your requirement, and is typically 7, 14 or 30 days. Backups are written to immutable storage, so recovery points can't be altered or deleted until the retention period ends, which protects against ransomware and accidental or malicious deletion. Many customers start with a shorter period and extend it as compliance or recoverability requirements tighten. If you need guaranteed restore times or longer offsite archiving, that is scoped separately.

FirstNet Private Cloud runs on clustered Dell PowerEdge servers with high availability at the hypervisor level. If a physical host fails, the affected virtual machines restart automatically on another host in the cluster. Live migration also lets running virtual machines move between hosts without downtime during maintenance or for load balancing. This protects against hardware failure inside a data centre. Protection against losing an entire site needs Geographic Disaster Recovery to a second FirstNet data centre.

Yes. FirstNet Private Cloud supports private, secure peering with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which suits hybrid designs and gradual migrations. You can also connect your own sites with site-to-site VPN, internet access, or private and dedicated links over FirstNet's carrier-neutral fibre network. The connectivity and segmentation you need, such as internet-facing or private-only and separate production and development, is designed during the sizing workshop.