TORONTO – Telus will join the increasing number of data centre providers in Canada offering hybrid cloud services that connect applications in corporate-owned or hosted private clouds or infrastructure, to public clouds.
The Vancouver-based telecommunications company said last week the new hybrid cloud service – to launch early next year – will allow organizations to shift workloads including virtual machines, operating systems, data, and applications between their private clouds (usually applications that need high security) and public clouds (applications that are under development or are less mission-critical).
"It's going to provide the ability to move workloads between these environments via a single pane of glass." Tom Jolly, the telco's vice-president of managed IT and cloud services told reporters at a Toronto event explaining the new services.
The flexibility will allow organizations to better meet the increase speed of development of new services that lines of business are demanding, he said.
Telus, which has seven data centres across the country, has offered public and private clouds services for some time. By adding a hybrid service it joins those offered by some of the biggest names including IBM Canada, Amazon's AWS service and Microsoft's Azure service, as well as Telus' traditional rivals, Bell Canada, Rogers Communications, and independents such as Cogeco, CenturyLink, Calgary's Long View Systems and Toronto's OnX Enterprise Solutions.
However, while their hybrid systems are internal to their own clouds, Telus' private and public clouds will connect first to Azure and then later in 2016 to VMware-based cloud platforms.
Cloud computing is generally sought by enterprises and governments to save money on infrastructure. Public clouds are used for shared compute and storage resources such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where servers can be paid for at a monthly price, or platform as a service (PaaS), where middleware and server cycles can be rented for application development, as well as software as a service applications (think Microsoft 365 or Salesforce) organizations have to manage. Company-developed services can also be offered in private clouds – either in a customer's or a provider's data centre – for better security.
Hybrid cloud allows customers to bridge both as needed – for example, when an application is finished development in a PaaS environment the organization can shift it either into a public or a private cloud.
Telus' hybrid cloud has been developed with network architecture from Cisco Systems on a platform around Microsoft's Azure cloud services. Microsoft is in the process of building two new data centres here and the Telus hybrid service will allow customers to move workloads between Azure data centres here or around the world and Telus' data centre.
From Telus' point of view, Jolly stressed, the new hybrid service will also allow it to talk to customers about cloud in terms of business cases – for example, application modernization, development and test, database as a service, backup as a service – not only as renting compute and storage. "In the years to come the conversation (with business) will very much switch from infrastructure as a service (and) hosting into what the use cases are and the ability to execute quickly on those use cases," he said.
Pricing hasn’t been announced. Telus said the new service will start in the first quarter.
Market analyst firm IDC Canada sees spending on hybrid cloud in Canada to hit $1 billion next year. "We're calling 2016 the year of hybrid," Tony Olvet, group vice-president of research, told reporters. IDC says that this year organizations will spend more than $2.8 billion on all cloud services in Canada – just over three quarters of that on public cloud. That will hit $4.6 billion by 2018.
“We're looking for an opportunity to bring some simplicity into that environment.” – Tom Jolly, Telus
Typically only organizations such as large financial institutions and governments have the IT skills and resources to build private clouds, he added. Hybrid clouds are a useful alternative to SMBs that have only one or two applications that can be managed in-house, but want more IT flexibility. "The ability to manage and click workloads to the public environment and back, that's where we're going to see the demand increasing,” said Olvet.
Telus believes 65% of medium and large enterprises in Canada "will commit to hybrid before the end of 2016."
Despite the multitude of cloud providers it's still an early market in this country compared to the U.S., Mark Schrutt, IDC Canada's vice-president of research for services and enterprise applications, said in an interview. While 65% of organizations may be interested in hybrid cloud, only a small amount of their data will be integrated. Less than 20% of companies' workloads are being used in public and private clouds, he pointed out.
But Telus will – for a short period of time – be ahead of many, he said. "With this Microsoft offering now they have a platform to integrate public, private and on-premise technologies as well as multi-cloud, so you can connect AWS or other cloud environments. All the other firms will have that capability within the next three to six months."
Data centre services is a hotly-competitive market among telecom and cable companies. For example, Rogers last week bought Halifax-based Internetworking Atlantic, which offers co-location and cloud services.
Many organizations which are already using cloud services are using more than one provider, Jolly noted in an interview. But that means having several service level agreements and tools. "We're looking for an opportunity to bring some simplicity into that environment. Do I expect that people are only going to buy cloud services from Telus? Absolutely not. but what we are focused on is modernizing that traditional outsourcing experience, giving them consumable infrastructure … and to the degree that we can giving them access to more choice to hyper-scale public cloud like Azure."
He'd say to a Telus customer, 'Do you want to simplify how you go about getting Azure? You can go contract with Microsoft or another partner, but since we're hosting your infrastructure currently and you want access to that environment we can simplify that an give you one common tool to do that."
Looking into the future, he added, service providers will become IT brokers for organizations offering customers a cloud services portal where they can offer access to a wide range of services – to infrastructure like AWS or a SaaS service like Amazon – and wrap a management service around them.
