Fujitsu offers services to implement hybrid cloud securely

Fujitsu is offering hybrid cloud services designed to help customers keep better control over data, while still allowing them to benefit from the cost savings in using public clouds for some workloads.

Announced today, Hybrid Cloud Services is aimed at customers of Fujitsu's cloud services looking to get the best value from the cloud, and specifically take advantage of the low cost of Microsoft's Azure platform.

What this boils down to is Fujitsu providing data hosting mechanisms that allow applications to be split between a Fujitsu cloud and a Windows Azure-based cloud, according to David Leen, Azure capability lead for Fujitsu UK.

"From a technical perspective, we are talking about the presentation layer and business logic of an application running on Azure, but we're providing the actual data hosting services from one of our cloud platforms or a customer's own premises, if necessary," he explained.

Fujitsu is also offering a complete professional services wrapper around this, so customers also get a single bill for all the cloud services they use, plus a single IT service desk to call if things go wrong.

"From a commercial and a service perspective, we're taking ownership of that service for the customer," said Leen.

Fujitsu is also able to offer customers control over where data gets stored in any public cloud infrastructure, according to the firm, which is key for public sector bodies and customers such as finance companies.

"Because of the economic climate, many public sector organisations are looking at options not considered before, providing you can meet their data residency requirements, where regulations entail full control over data," Leen said.

However, he warned that Azure is not accredited to UK government security standards, so take-up of Microsoft's cloud is largely limited to services where data is not deemed to be sensitive.

This release of Fujitsu's Hybrid Cloud Services is focused on Azure, but the company is considering extending support to other public cloud platforms, according to Leen.

"We have a lot of experience of putting together solutions that are already hybrid using other cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com," he said.

However, customers have been requesting this capability because of cost savings of 30 per cent or more when developing and running applications on Azure compared with hosting it on their own infrastructure, according to Leen.

"The cost benefits of the Azure platform are just amazing," he said.