BT is redoubling its ‘cloud of clouds’ efforts

BT is bolstering its partnership with Ark Data Centres to expand its ‘cloud of clouds’ initiative and its reach in the public sector, healthcare and financial services.

Launched in April this year, the ‘cloud of clouds’ service is much like Equinix’s cloud interconnection service, linking its own datacentres and cloud services with its own and others through its own fibre network.

The companies said BT will leverage two of Ark’s new UK datacentres to offer its infrastructure as a service platform, BT Compute, as well as its financial services and healthcare-focused managed cloud platforms.

Ark said the datacentres are amongst the most energy efficient out there, with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2 compared to an industry average of 1.7 according to the Uptime Institute.

Neil Lock, vice president, BT Compute, BT Global Services said: “Organisations in all industries are embracing the need for greater innovation through digital strategies that rely on cloud services.  This is especially true for public sector bodies faced with the complex challenge of transforming services sustainably with increasingly tight budgets.”

“By adding two new data centres to our BT Compute portfolio that comply with the latest government security guidelines, we believe that we have the ideal platform on which to innovate. We already deliver some great cloud services to our government, finance and pharma sector customers. Our latest investment builds on this strength to help us realise our cloud of clouds vision for large organisations.”

The datacentres additions will help bolster the company’s cloud scale in its home market. BT claims its ‘cloud of clouds’ is already being deployed form about 20 facilities globally and a further 30 third-party datacentres operated by other cloud providers.