Turning Tin into Gold
The mantra rattling around the aisles of data centres for the last decade has been about how they can host a company’s ICT infrastructure, take away their complexity and let them get on with their core business. With the onset of virtualisation and improved broadband infrastructure, the message has evolved and become the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) proposition.
Many organisations have already moved their e-mail servers and even their PBX telephone systems to the cloud, letting someone else manage the hardware and take charge of delivering the service. As one of many tenants availing of the service, economies of scale mean that the customer gets more for less without any capital investment.
With a service provider taking care of a company’s ‘tin’ and delivering an on-demand service, the payback comes quickly, according to Catherine Casey, marketing manager with Fujitsu. This is not just in terms of costs savings, but in the longer term, around strategy and growth.
“Even taking into account the implementation and change management costs, IaaS offerings can typically start delivering savings from day one, achieving up to 40 per cent ongoing savings compared with traditional infrastructure delivery models,” she said.
“Just as importantly, they give a business the flexibility to scale systems and services up and down quickly and easily, significantly boosting business agility and competitiveness.”
The strategy for IaaS providers is to forge relationships with their customers, leveraging new technology for them to help their businesses develop. BT has benefited from this approach.
“We opened our Irish operation in early 2000 and benefited from the economic boom – and customers wanting to move to a data centre for cost-saving benefits – and it has evolved since then,” said Jason Drewett, head of data hosting with BT Ireland.
“We have seen the balance shift from customers moving from simple colocation racks to a rationalisation strategy with virtualisation. Now, the challenge is about taking virtualisation and cost-saving measures to the next level.”
An IaaS strategy will also help a company control its power costs and pursue eco-strategies, because data centres are at the cutting edge of energy efficiency and the first adopters of green technology. But there is also an opportunity for strategic business gains.
“At BT, we have a depth of skills that enable us to take our customers on a journey, helping them to assess and improve their infrastructure,” said Drewett.
One concern regarding IaaS is that organisations run the risk of losing control over their infrastructure. Aware of this perception, BT will soon be launching its virtual data centre (VDC), a pre-provisioned infrastructure that customers can manage and monitor through a secure, self service portal.
Make the connection
The cloud infrastructure discussion is about more than the data centres, as Steve MacNicholas, managing director of Interfusion, was quick to make clear. As a telecommunications provider to the enterprise sector, he said that his company – and other telcos – had a major role to play in cloud adoption.
“Connectivity is the understated piece in the whole solutions,” he said. “You have Microsoft talking about outing BPOS [Business Productivity Online Standard Suite] in the cloud, but how do you get there? We’re the middle piece between the user and the virtualised data centre.”
He said that internet-based connectivity was a big issue for enterprise customers, who needed more assurances in terms of service level agreements and security than a public network would give them.
“And bandwidth is not the issue, it’s about how secure the data is when moved from point A to point B,” he said.
Interfusion’s NetHop service spans three Irish data centres, and provides a secure private infrastructure to support enterprise cloud activity. It’s also affordable, a factor that undermined the first attempt at web-based service delivery.
“In 2001,ADSLwasn’t available and customers had to buy ATM[asynchronous transfer mode] infrastructure, which made the solution too expensive. That’s why the dotcom failed and those data centres were vacated,” he said.
“It was the right idea at the wrong time, because the physical infrastructure wasn’t there,” Mac Nicholas said.
Interfusion is also exploring new opportunities that come with the cloud, and is about to launch MailHop – a mail services product pitched against Microsoft Exchange that sits in the data centre.
“E-mail is one of main applications for the cloud because companies want to take out high usage, relatively simple applications that are time-consuming to manage. Mail Hop works out 40-50 per cent cheaper than Exchange,” he said.
