Cloud Done Right

Orange Digital decided to offload its cloud services to the Amazon cloud late last year, believing that the cost-to-benefit ratio was weighted in favor of Amazon. “Our infrastructure was expensive to run and time-consuming to maintain,” explained Neil Jennings, lead enterprise architect at Orange Digital. Based on the size of the company’s cloud business and its customers’ needs, the Amazon cloud made sense.

Telefónica Digital, on the other hand, asked the same questions and decided to launch its own cloud-services infrastructure portfolio. Underlining the importance of data security, the company’s Instant Servers claim 100 percent data reliability and integrity. Many industry analysts believe Telefónica’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product will rival Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Carlos Morales, Telefónica Digital’s cloud and M2M director, commented last fall on how a rock-solid cloud environment is crucial to the development and monetization of cloud ecosystems. “Instant Servers ... seeks to meet the needs of thousands of businesses that require a cloud services platform that is easily scalable, with low latency and totally trustworthy, enabling them not only to rapidly respond to their own needs, but also to the expectations of their customers.”

The fact that an Amazon outage can interrupt so many cloud-driven services should give CSPs pause. What we’re witnessing in today’s cloud market is beginning to look like a new version of an old story in telecommunications: vendor tie-in. In an age of partnership and coopetition, it makes sense for CSPs to look to several partners when building their cloud-service portfolios. After all, customer needs will vary, and flexibility is paramount. The capability to offer customers a wide array of security and service options that occupy numerous spots along the cloud continuum is a competitive advantage, and will typify the successful cloud service providers of the future.

This is the cloud done right.