The game changer

By now we’re all comfortable with the Internet and cloud computing, and you certainly don’t need me to tell you how important both those innovations have been.  On Wednesday October 29th it will be 45 years since the first message was sent over the Internet.  While much has changed since those days I can’t help but be struck that the very first message ever transmitted via the Internet was cut short, with the desired ‘login’ being cut down to a simple ‘lo”. I doubt there’s anyone reading this that hasn’t had a similar moment with the Internet.

The public internet has grown at an incredible pace and the sheer volume of material that gets passed around without a thought these days is truly fantastic. The Internet has served as an engine for social change, for democracy, for retail and, yes, also for the widespread sharing of cat videos. I think that’s wonderful.

However, there’s a problem too. With businesses and organisations looking to increase their use of cloud services, whether to improve efficiency or to create new revenue streams, the weight piling onto the public internet is growing. The network – the essence of the Internet – is under strain, with no way of judging whether that packet of data is a really critical piece of business data or simply the latest in the long line of cats doing battle against printers.

We’ve been considering this challenge in relation to business applications for some time and the solution is clear. We needed to bring the reliability, flexibility and predictability of a private network with the global reach of the Internet, together with enterprise private and public cloud connectivity and interconnected data centres.

If we can deliver that then we’re also in a position to enable a new level of reliable cloud computing, bringing together all the pieces of the cloud puzzle together to make it easy for a company to explore how it wants to shape the cloud for its own enhancement, without the restriction or concern of having to trust important information to the public Internet – be it private, public or hybrid models.

I’m enormously proud of our achievement in putting this puzzle together. With IZO™ we have developed the world’s most comprehensive enterprise WAN and cloud enablement platform that revolutionises the way businesses approach using the public Internet and cloud services.

IZO™ Internet WAN gives business-class SLAs over the public internet and makes the Internet fit for business. IZO™ Private connects businesses across network, cloud services and data centres over MPLS and Ethernet and IZO Public which tags and prioritises content with guaranteed performance for Tata Communications’ enterprise customers.

None of this would be possible without our network – and here I’m referring to our ecosystem of 20+ network providers covering 34 countries and serving 85% of the world’s GDP countries, the two largest cloud platforms Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and over 50 data centres across the globe. Backed by our truly global Tier-1 IP network, global MPLS and Ethernet network spanning across 190+ countries.

IZO™ is game changing not just because it addresses genuine business challenges in a seamless and simple manner, but because it represents a truly partnering approach to solving network challenges now and in the future.

If you have any questions or thoughts about the new service, please comment below.