When quality of service is up in the clouds

Posted by Simon Michie | 07 February 2014, 12:27 PM

Whenever we talk to new or potential customers, quality of service is always at the top of the list when discussing a move into the cloud. In some cases they’ve put some of their apps or compute resources into the public cloud as a test and it’s failed to deliver on the service levels they require.

One of the challenges for pure cloud providers is that the quality of service is more often than not determined by the network connection between the customer and the cloud provider, than any other part of the network. Most companies wouldn’t rely on a public internet connection to run their infrastructure so why then use it for cloud services?

There have been some moves by the big providers to address this issue in recent months. Firstly, Microsoft announced that it has teamed up with global telecoms provider, AT&T to provide private network access to their Azure cloud service. And Amazon followed suit launching its Direct Connect service a few months ago – possibly as a result of some high profile outages of its public cloud service.

While it’s good to see the pure cloud providers recognise and address the issue of variable network connections and the impact on quality of service, customers are still going to have to navigate some complex organisational and contractual boundaries to receive cloud services from two different vendors – integrated or not.

It will also be interesting to see how these relationships between cloud service and network providers develop. Take AT&T for example, it currently has its own cloud service, which operates under the brand ‘Synaptic,’ but for how much longer in light of its deal with Microsoft?

At Redcentric we’ve always approached cloud services as a single integrated offering running over our own network. With expertise in both the network infrastructure and the cloud we’re able to provide guarantees of quality of service to our customers.

As the market starts to consolidate with providers merging network and application services, what’s important is that customers are able to benefit from a truly integrated, end-to-end, secure service with a provider that can guarantee quality.

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