Iomart takes hosting into the cloud

Iomart offers a 100 per cent business uptime guarantee

Hosting firm Iomart has added two new cloud services to its existing hosted platform portfolio.

The services allow companies to access and manage scalable computing resources without the need for capital investment, providing increased efficiency and lower costs, according to the firm.

CloudXtra is aimed at development and short-term or seasonal projects, and lets customers make use of Iomart's resources on a pay-per-use model, giving access to as much storage and processing power as required.

CloudSure, meanwhile, is a longer-term platform-as-a-service model designed to provide a complete networking, server, storage and application infrastructure without having to host the systems internally.

"The benefits of cloud computing are hugely exciting but as yet are relatively untapped," said Angus MacSween, chief executive of Iomart Hosting.

"With our two cloud hosting offerings, we are meeting the needs of two distinct markets. We are catering for the company that needs to expand its current IT infrastructure on a short-term basis, and also, for example, the company that requires high availability for disaster recovery purposes."

Despite the launch of various other cloud platforms from companies including Amazon, Salesforce.com and Rackspace, MacSween reckons that Iomart is the " first in the UK to offer genuine cloud services".

This claim is down to the fact that Iomart owns all of the infrastructure across its five datacentres, promising multi-site redundancy and a 100 per cent business uptime guarantee.

Iomart has also partnered with networking firm AboveNet to connect Iomart's Tier 3 datacentre to AboveNet's dedicated fibre network for London-based customers with connectivity and performance concerns about moving to a fully hosted environment.

"Cloud computing services will ultimately only be trusted for mission-critical applications if they are delivered over a highly available, fast, dependable network," said John Donaldson, managing director at AboveNet UK.