NTT Communications reveals IaaS Enterprise Cloud offering

Japanese telecoms giant NTT Communications has announced the global availability of its Enterprise Cloud, a virtualised infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering with datacentres now in the US, the UK and Asia Pacific.

NTT Communications first launched its software-defined networking (SDN)-based Enterprise Cloud offering via datacentres in Japan and Hong Kong in June 2012. The additional datacentres will now allow customers worldwide to take advantage of the offering.

Len Padilla, NTT Europe senior technology director, told V3 that the Enterprise Cloud will be delivered as a public cloud, rather than as an offering that will allow customers to own a private cloud in NTT Communications's datacentres.

"[The Enterprise Cloud] is a shared platform, so we are not deploying individual devices per customer, but they can configure the available network. So they can segment the network to get the security and availability they want with a lot of flexibility as well," Padilla told V3.

"Customers, instead of reconfiguring machines on a flat network, will be able to create a multi-tier network, creating eight or nine individual segments. Then they will be able to insert firewalls in-between those segments and load balance over those segments."

An SDN-driven portal will give customers a single dashboard to obtain real-time resource use and to configure virtual machines, firewalls and load balancers.

The NTT datacentre in the UK is based in Hemel Hampstead, North London. In addition to five datacentres in Asia, the firm has also deployed a datacentre on the US East Coast and another on the US West Coast, as well as one in Sydney, Australia. Customers will be able to specify where their data is to be held.

"The issue of data sovereignty is really important to us. Customers should be able to put data into the cloud and specify where it is. We know for many customers it's also a regulatory compliance issue," said Padilla.