Mike Tighe, executive director, Comcast Business, speaking at the DatacenterDynamics Enterprise USA event this week, called on the IT industry to speed up its adoption of open standards in an echo of the calls for more sharing from the Open Compute conference in San Jose last week and Cole Crawford's comments at DCD CEBIT..

Tighe said: “Modern businesses will have to get smarter and much more agile just to survive. In the current world IT budgets are now being slashed by new C-suit executives because they know that the cloud can provide great infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). They are now forcing the pace of change since this part of IT has few standards.

"Legacy systems cannot be deployed quickly enough so are being actively sidelined. CIOs are going to find that they have to work with masive IT budget cuts as standard” he said.

He cited a company he knew of where across-the-board cuts of 40 per cent were demanded of the IT department with no loss of service over a three-year period.

Tighe said that Hybrid was the way to go. Comcast says billing must be in-house because it is critical to the business and at the moment security is a problem with some cloud deployments.Oganisations are just not optimized for agile or rapid development. Time to market for a new application to support a new product could be 18 months – meaning that the already-developed product goes out 18 months late.

Hybrid service delivery mainstream

In Tighe’s opinion hybrid service delivery and multi-cloud are mainstream, the use of multiple cloud services will increase and core applications will remain in house. He sees growth in use of 3rd party data centers with IT’s role evolving into to a service bureau type function to deliver applications (ITaaSB).

Tighe’s practical experience of the headaches lack of cloud connectivity standards serve up was summed up by  an experience he had selling Ethernet to the big carriers.

It was only when Comcast discovered a company called Synchronous, which had strong electronic links to the carriers, was he able to do - in two months - a job his in-house engineers had estimated would take eighteen-months. Tighe said: “Using Synchronous’ network and our private ethernet network we were taking our first orders within five months.”

Time to market critical

For Comcast, business time to market for high growth network products is critical. Comcast calls this Cloud Direct – by using Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from any premises to AWS. Using Direct Connect, they can establish private connectivity between AWS and the data center, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput and provide a bettert network experience than internet-based connections.

Here comes the multi-cloud

Comcast connects its users through a private ethernet network to the data centers of the cloud providers Tighe said. “The first step was to connect our network to 350 multi-tenant data centers to enable the transfer of IP infrastructure to data centers. We have good business links with leading cloud service providers such as AWS everywhere in the USA.”

“However what we are finding is that as we connect to leading cloud service providers all of them have different connectivity options. This slows us and customers down – we have to standardize how to connect from the network to the cloud.”

We have to standardize how to connect from the network to the cloud

Mike Tighe

Same as the old cloud?

Tighe said that: “The establishment of standards to connect the network to cloud would be a huge enabler. Cloud computing is making the procurement, implementation, and management of technology more manageable for the nontechnologist. We must find a standard connectivity of linking from the network to the cloud to the private networks because that’s what they need. What we have to do as an industry – is ensure that there are standard connectivity options whether you are Microsoft, AWS or Google.”

SLA Hell or Heaven?

It is very difficult to get end-to-end Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that cover the entire network, compute, storage and datacentre environments. Without this, customers are left with a patchwork quilt of SLAs that may not cover the whole solution or properly reflect the impact on the system of a small component failure.

Tighe said: “I think this is a good first step – the forum is starting with the connectivity problems of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), then probably on to Platform as a Service (PaaS) then Software as a Service (SaaS). These standards will transform the use of cloud.”