Published on the 16/02/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Global Cloud Xchange is within a month of switching on its first A/NZ node, intended to allow local enterprises to deploy a cloud arbitrage strategy…
The company, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications with plans to list on the Mumbai Stock exchange within 18 months, has been rolling out a high speed fibre optic network intended to connect global data centres around the world. As part of that it has announced two nodes, or points-of-presence, in each of Australia and New Zealand, with the Sydney node slated to come online within a month.
According to chief executive officer Bill Barney, who was in Sydney this week, Global Cloud Xchange makes it possible for enterprises to connect to any cloud-based resource anywhere in the world without worrying about connection speeds or latency.
“This won’t revolutionise cloud computing in A/NZ overnight,” he acknowledged, but Barney said that the global connectivity would eventually permit organisations to “arbitrage compute and storage around the world”.
He suggested that over time this would help eliminate the need for many organisations to run any form of in-house computing operations, and instead leverage cloud infrastructure around the world. He admitted though that this was still three to four years distant for many organisations, though some small and medium businesses had already started the transition to entirely cloud driven models.
“There is a huge disruption coming – the efficiency in the consumer space will be recognised in the enterprise space,” said Barney, with fibre communications networks providing the plumbing required for high speed, secure international computing.
He said that for the price that an enterprise might pay for a laptop, it was possible to connect a relatively dumb terminal to the cloud and for the same cost have 55 times the speed, 600 Gbytes of memory and 12 exabytes of storage. Of course the enterprise would in this scenario also be wholly reliant on third parties to provide its computing infrastructure – attractive to some, but not all.
Whatever the bold claims Global Cloud Xchange however can’t expect to have the cloud communications market to itself, and already local companies such as Optus and Telstra have signalled they want to play in this arena. Telstra for example bought Pacnet in 2014 (which Barney previously led) as it looked to push into global fibre communications and become a leading local cloud portal.
Barney’s strategy with Global Cloud Xchange is to focus on the fast-growing but relatively underserviced communications corridors across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
