European colo provider Telecity is launching its own cloud ecosystem, following a trend in the industry for third parties to come up with ways of accessing and migrating cloud environments between public and private and traditional data center offerings.  

Unlike others, which provide service catalogues for cloud services, Telecity is instead focussing on providing the interconnections, leveraging its network ecosystem already in place at its large colo footprint to allow for easier and safer access to the Cloud.

It plans to roll its Cloud-IX ecosystem out across facilities in Europe, depending on where demand is being seen for the cross connects for cloud, TelecityGroup UK managing director Rob Coupland said.

“Cloud-IX will provide the flexibility for customers to be a lot more sophisticated about how they roll out cloud applications and services,” Coupland said.

“One cloud provider might be best suited for one kind of application, while another may be better for a second application. You need to buy or lease the connections between these services and it can all get very complex very quickly.”

Coupland described Cloud-IX as the “cloud of clouds”. He said it has been designed to allow for seamless connectivity between cloud providers - including Amazon Web Services, VMware partner iland, CSC, Fujitsu and Outsourcery - and physical systems and networks.

“This will be a really simple process – both from a provisioning point of view as well as from a commercial perspective,” Coupland said.

It will cover private, hybrid and public cloud deployments with Telecity security management added throughout the process.

“We are giving organizations a lot more control about where and how their data is located and sorted,” Coupland said.

Telecity is doing this by allowing cloud connections over dedicated, private connections rather than the public internet, and offering users control over where their data is being located across Europe.

The direct connections, according to Telecity, also increases the availability scenario for the cloud users and opens the door for companies using Telecity services that want to trial new services in the public cloud.

Coupland said Cloud-IX is an evolution of Telecity’s network ecosystem, as it adds to services it traditionally provides for network service providers.

“But the service is unique in that nobody else owns the underlying assets like we do – in particular the data center and the highly connected carrier neutral ecosystem that is within it.”