“What we’re trying to do is build campuses across the globe in strategic locations that allow cloud providers to locate on our campus facilities and then provide connectivity between all the cloud providers so that customers can then locate their collocation requirements or maybe their one rack or two racks in the campus environment with upstream links straight into the public cloud providers,” he said.
According to Keogh, the company has continued to grow steadily in recent years, making acquisitions in Europe to help it within the space of collocation and connectivity services where he says it is meeting more consumer than wholesale demand.
“On the public cloud side of things, Ireland is growing very strongly at the moment and many large organisations are building out megascale data centres in Dublin and around the country, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple,” he said.
“That is an excellent stimulus for business growth in the cloud area because it’s going to result in the cluster and magnet effect and that’s good for all of us in the data centre business. We expect things to continue to grow.”
For Digital Reality, geographic location is less of an issue when it comes to attracting cloud providers because its diverse locations mean that customers don’t experience delays in using its services.
“That said, for some companies, depending on the markets they’re targeting, issues like data protection, security, comfort, storage and the peace of mind that comes with operating within Europe and knowing their data isn’t leaving the region is important,” said Keogh.
Provider mobility
Meanwhile one issue that is appearing as the spread of value added services and products continue is the thorny question of how companies can move provider. Taking data and infrastructure from one cloud provider to another to benefit from cheaper rates or to access new services can be complex.
According to Amazon Web Services’ Massingham, whether this is a problem or not depends on who the cloud providers are.
“We announced a service last year called Amazon Snowball, a transportable petabyte-scale physical storage device that can be used for moving large volumes of data in and out of the cloud very rapidly. So there are options out there for customers that want portability of data and want to move it between different services but it’s actually pretty rare for customers to want to move away from AWS,” he said.
“We have a falling price model in which we continuously reduce prices over time. We’ve reduced prices 51 times since we launched back in 2006 so our customers don’t have to ask us for a cost reduction – it just appears on their bills without the customer having to take any action.”
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