Published on the 15/05/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Ahead of offering its service in Australia the vendor has not named any local clients, but is touting private clouds built on established infrastructure as the key to rapid regional expansion…
Kevin Taylor, regional and global logistics president for BT Global Services, said that the economies of scale and technical expertise that a large cloud provider can bring to the table would be hard for individual businesses to match when embarking on expansion initiatives.
While BT has long offered a range of different cloud services it launched its Cloud Compute offering at the end of April. Cloud Compute is offered out of 45 different data centres around the world and Taylor said that BT has plans to offer it out of an Australian data centre in the next 12 months (addressing any data sovereignty issues that companies may still face).
BT claims its Cloud Compute routinely delivers service levels of 99.95 percent uptime and provides enterprises with a framework to mix and match their private clouds with applications running on BT’s global cloud. Taylor said companies that wanted to expand globally could “put their own applications on our platforms and then operate that globally,” knowing that all staff would have access to the same functions wherever they were based.
Although BT has yet to name any local users of the service it has signed two agreements with financial service providers and a third with a health services provider in Western Australia, which will run its contact centre operations from BT’s cloud.
Taylor said that a particular benefit for clients was the high level of security BT’s Cloud Compute platform was able to offer. In Australia security has become an important focus for the company and the local security practice has grown 300 percent in the last year according to Taylor, with particularly strong demand from the finance sector.
