As a subsidiary of a multi-billion-dollar Tata Group conglomerate based in India, Tata Communications is not without access to financial resources. Today, Tata Communications announced it has created a global IZO cloud network based on 50 data centers and partnerships with 20 providers of network services.
IZO comes in three forms. IZO Public is a shared set of network services. But Tata Communications is also making available an IZO Virtual Private Network offering, through which organizations can create an overlay across the Tata global network. Finally, there is IZO Private, a service through which IT organizations can create a direct network connection with any number of cloud service providers, including Tata itself.
By aggregating all these services, Tata Communications says it can reduce the total cost of cloud networking by as much as 30 percent, while still providing customers with guaranteed end-to-end service level agreements.
John Hayduk, president of product management and service development for Tata Communications, says the portion of the network built by Tata consists of networking equipment from Juniper Networks and Alcatel-Lucent. The network services themselves are not programmable yet via an application programming interface, but Hayduk says that will be the next step. In the meantime, IT organizations can select from a menu of pre-configured cloud networking services that make setting up a cloud network a matter of days, as opposed to weeks and months.
As organizations look to take advantage of the cloud to go global, they quickly discover that building network services in the cloud is both a time-consuming and laborious process. The good news is that carriers of all kinds are rapidly improving both the quality of those services and the amount of time it takes to deploy them. In fact, one day soon, as part of the general shift toward software-defined networking (SDNs), IT organizations will be able to programmatically provision cloud networks via an API in just matter of minutes.