Japan’s NTT Communications (NTT Com) has announced five major improvements to its Enterprise Cloud in a bid to become the chosen vehicle for digital transformation. The new enhanced Enterprise Cloud is immediately available in Japan, and will be rolled out in the UK, Singapore, US, Australia, Hong Kong and Germany later this year.
According to NTT Com, enterprises want to make the difficult crossing from traditional IT to the cloud but need greater support. In response, it has announced that its new Enterprise Cloud offering will make the journey easier. The new improved offerings are described by NTT Com as Hosted Private Cloud for traditional ICT, Multi Tenant Cloud for cloud native ICT, seamless hybrid clouds, free and seamless connections between cloud platforms and a cloud management platform to give full visibility and governance.
NCC Com said enterprises with cloud ambitions face two major challenges: migration of their traditional systems and, having gone to the cloud, changing their mode of development-operations to fit the new ‘cloud native’ application culture.
NTT Com outlined how each of these five Enterprise Cloud ‘enhancements’ will help its target clients. The Hosted Private Cloud for Traditional ICT now consists of dedicated bare-metal servers with options for multi-hypervisor environments, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The logic of the service is to make it easier for companies with traditional ICT to migrate to a hosted private cloud.
The Enterprise-class Multi-tenant Cloud for Cloud-Native ICT is based on OpenStack architecture, giving customers an industry-standard open API to control the Enterprise Cloud. It comes with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software from Cloud Foundry in order to provide Dev-Ops efficiencies. The open architecture was needed to address customer concerns about vendor lock-ins, says NTT Com.
The Seamless Hybrid Cloud Environment is created for clients by NTT Com configuring all the relevant network components (the virtual servers, bare-metal servers, firewalls and load balancers) running on complex on-premises environments.
The promised ‘Free and Seamless Connection between Cloud Platforms’ is made by connecting the Enterprise Cloud with a 10Gbps best-effort closed network, free of charge. In addition, connectivity between Enterprise Cloud platforms and data centres is provided at ‘competitive’ prices globally, said NTT Com.
Finally, the new Cloud Management Platform (CMP) promises full visibility and IT governance by unifying the control of both Enterprise Cloud and third-party providers’ clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.