Multinational Clouds Present New Challenges To Organisations

Multinationals looking to use clouds that cross national boundaries may think it will simplify business operations but could run into problems implementing them, according to a telco executive.

Speaking at the Cloud World Forum in London, Martin Bishop, Telstra’s global head of hosting services, said CIOs are always looking to simplify their approach to ICT and a globally consistent approach to cloud, network and communications services is ”key to this”.

Border control

“While borderless cloud will simplify your business, they are anything but simple to establish and there are many challenges in implementing them. The complexity only increases as international borders are crossed,” Bishop said.

He added that his company had carried out a review of many of the leading global providers of cloud services. A Telestra audit showed that supplier management is often complex, with different technological approaches in different locations affecting interoperability and service fulfilment.

“The future of borderless cloud will be delivered by providers that know the culture and markets they are dealing in and that have built logical interoperable networks from the ground up that utilise simple, consistent ICT infrastructure,” Bishop said.

Bishop also pointed out the differences between countries that meant some were more expensive to run the cloud in than others.

“Bandwidth costs are much higher in Jakarta compared with Tokyo. Along with many different factors, this highlights the difficulties companies have operating in emerging, compared with established, markets,” added Bishop.

He said the network must not be overlooked and that latency is also a key consideration given the even-greater distances involved in international cloud operations.