There will be those out there who are familiar with a concern from employees that they have access to a better online experience at home than they have at work. It may seem like a particularly personal concern but it hints at an issue which should give businesses pause for thought. Namely the increasing importance of business class networks (rather than the Internet) as the access platform for cloud services consumed by organisations throughout Ireland. In this country research is already there to suggest that there’s a gap in the market in relation to the awareness of this issue.
If you look at other markets, you’ll see the integration of the network with a cloud service is a very important need and one which is addressed by an increasing amount of organisations. As a cloud provider, we understand that we’ll be providing some cloud services ourselves and customers will also consume cloud services form other providers, that’s the reality of life and that’s not going to change.
This is not the issue here. What is an issue however, is that a recent study focused on the EMEA market found that more than three quarters of the respondents had altered or changed their network in some way, shape or fashion after subscribing to cloud services.
In turn, there are some huge opportunities for improvement that go hand in hand with this trend. Companies can possibly increase bandwidth. They may also take advantage of the opportunity to buy a higher quality network service — they may upgrade their class of service profile, as well as utilising it more effectively.
In the US and other nations around Europe, there’s a recognition of the importance of network services in conjunction with cloud
All those things are important. What is imperative is for organisations to be committed to improving themselves through this process and be always looking to see what kind of improvements can be gained from the service itself.
The service might be great but when the performance over the network isn’t what it should be, then you have a poor grounding for moving things forward in a way that you’d want in a really well run organisation.
The network and the cloud together are critical and I don’t think that’s often seen in the Irish market, at least at this point of market maturity. In general terms in how this trend has developed elsewhere — for example in the US and other nations around Europe — there’s a recognition of the importance of network services in conjunction with cloud. It’s seen as a critical point and major industry influencers, including a large number of leading global research organisations have all written about the subject.
An example of our work in this area is of course our announcement earlier in the year of a global agreement between BT and Microsoft to provide network business class services to the Microsoft Azure platform, Microsoft’s public cloud platform, with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute.
It allows customers to take advantage of the flexibility and agility offered by cloud resources, with the assurance of a dedicated, more secure connection to their data and applications.
Customers can bypass the public internet when connecting to Azure through a private connection based on BT’s IP Connect VPN service. As a result, enterprise customers have a seamless, hybrid IT environment encompassing their corporate networks, data centres and the Azure cloud platform.
I think what this indicates is really that the association between network and cloud is now certainly recognised by the providers, it’s also becoming recognised by the consumers of these services as well as businesses in many other jurisdictions and markets.
Irish businesses, whether they’re using private cloud, public cloud or a variation via hybrid, can work with their service providers including BT to assess what they doing with cloud platforms.
They need to look at where the cloud services are located and what the necessary performance levels are required on their network. We can then work with them to determine what level of access and service they need. Providing them with the best level of performance they need to satisfy their business requirements at each turn.
Brendan McMorrow is market research and insight manager with BT Ireland
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