UK headquartered telecom player COLT has just launched the latest element in its growing Cloud offering – Cloud Infrastructure Services, which aims to alleviate CIO’s dayto- day concerns around managing business risk, improving enterprise services and reducing costs.

The services are an extension of COLT’s enterprise cloud portfolio. It also offers storage for the systems within the Cloud Infrastructure, with several storage classes on offer to meet varying customer requirements.

As part of the offering COLT will provide proactive performance and capability monitoring of devices to minimise bottlenecks or storage capacity shortages. This monitoring portal will give data center managers what is claimed to be an easy-toview dashboard with a range of reporting functions for continuous monitoring and analysis of service performance. Managed security systems with firewall policy options are also provided, along with load balancers and infrastructure combinations from leading hardware and software vendors.

“Customers need both flexibility and certainty in their business,” says Maggy McClelland, Managing Director of COLT Managed Services. “We have ensured that our Cloud Infrastructure Services address key CIO business issues – namely managing business risk, improving service and reducing costs. This is achieved by scaling from small to large servers, by providing secure access via COLT private networking and/or the internet and by monitoring services 24x7x365."

“Enterprises need pervasive connectivity to virtualised assets, backed with robust performance guarantees and transparent monitoring tools,” comments Camille Mendler of analysts Yankee Group. “Not least, there is an urgent need for trusted intermediaries to federate private, public and hybrid cloud environments.”

COLT entered the Cloud services market in July 2009 with a managed workspace offering and is based on its 25,000km of network and set of 19 data centers across Europe.

CLOUD-BASED BI: WILL HAPPEN, WON'T BE A MONEYSPINNER - IDC
The Cloud business intelligence (BI) and analytics market will grow more than three times faster than the traditional on-premise market by 2015 – but won’t be as big a revenue spinner for vendors.

Market watcher IDC is the source of this mixed evaluation, which forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through to 2013 for business analytics delivered as a service. The company also points out that actual dollar sales from the Cloud sector of the market will remain low relative to on-premise software throughout the forecast period, due to the low starting point of users for the on demand model.

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Keywords: Cloud Infrastructure Services, Colt, data center, security systems, firewall, networking, monitoring tools.