Today there is no longer one type of cloud computing or cloud service. There are clouds of clouds, from giant global public cloud offerings to hosted private cloud and multiple variations in between. The ICT services sector has taken up the term hybrid, which is useful to distinguish the fact that very few organisations opt for a single version of cloud architecture for their needs. The key challenges of hybrid are essentially that the organisation is mixing resources or services that may be multi-tenant, dedicated, on-premises, in a data centre, or coming from different providers. All of that has to be managed as a coherent whole which should not be underestimated, but neither should it be considered a barrier to change or evolution.
This is the context in which BT Cloud Compute has just been launched into the Irish market, this month. Viewed simply, it is a new and powerful top end global Cloud offering to complement our BT data centre and cloud portfolio that covers, quite simply, every possible current requirement of any enterprise or organisation in Ireland, and globally, for ICT services; from cloud computing in all its varieties, to connectivity into data centres, to universal communications. BT has been ranked by Gartner as a world leader in its Magic Quadrant for Network Services for the eleventh year running, so all of our technology services can be delivered with enterprise best-in-class SLAs with the option of fully managed services.
What BT Cloud Compute means for Ireland is that Dublin now has one of the 22 BT Cloud Compute instances worldwide, all of which are connected seamlessly together and are all accessible via a single portal view. This is a set of top world class resources which can be availed of by clients as a global infrastructure, or as a regional or geopolitically defined capability for their needs. It is the next generation of on-demand compute; a comprehensive cloud service that allows any organisation to design and create, deploy, monitor and manage its complete public and private cloud infrastructure including virtual machines, networks and storage, on a local and or global scale. In essence, BT Cloud Compute is pre-provisioned data centre infrastructure that offers global scale with local focus where the client requires. It can be managed directly by the organisation itself through a web portal or taken as a managed service from BT.
Ireland now has many enterprises which are multinational, but not on the scale that we usually think of. They may well be medium-sized by most standards but gaining traction in different export markets, typically in Europe and North America. Using BT Cloud Compute, regardless of your global location, it is simple to set up and deploy a local infrastructure in a regional BT Cloud instance, ensuring availability, performance and compliance with geographical legal or other governance requirements being satisfied. Different data protection regimes, for instance, can be properly followed from the very beginning — literally before the business even starts trading. At the same time the ICT model is probably going to be the same as the enterprise deploys in Ireland, for example using the same corporate applications or SaaS choices. But there might well be locally hosted local versions of the business web site or customer portal or stock catalogue.
This is true cloud, with all of the scalability, flexibility and computing power that might be expected. A relatively small enterprise can manage its ICT resources as smartly as a big multinational, with central oversight and reporting but regional variations according to legal jurisdiction, market best practice, cultural differences or whatever differentiations it chooses — and all through a single web portal.
What BT Cloud Compute offers, above all else, is the widest possible range of choice to suit the organisation and its business or activity. Any client can combine public and private cloud, third party cloud services, integration with hosted or on-premises resources and orchestrate them all effectively and economically. The total solution is tailored to the current needs of the client and its users, but is agile enough to be speedily scaled or transformed when necessary. We see it as more than simply hybrid cloud. It is a new hybrid IT environment or ecosystem in which an organisation can take advantage of the widest range of technologies and services as appropriate for its needs and its policy choices.
Through BT Cloud Compute we can deliver all of that. The organisation can manage the whole set of resources itself, it can opt for a managed service to wrap the whole thing together — or, of course, it can combine self-managed with specific managed services. In a market where evolution rather than revolution is becoming the norm, BT will help clients on their journey at the pace of their choosing.
Barry McMahon is propositions manager of BT Ireland
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