With a significant UK footprint of roughly 80 data centres, 265 PoPs and 13,700km of fibre customers can connect to SSE, into cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Office 365 services and Amazon Web Services plus a raft of others such as, Google Cloud that SSE confirm will be implemented on priority requests.
Speaking to Capacity Media, Jeff Smith, head of product development at SSE Enterprise Telecoms, said: “We’ve been catching up with our competitors, as many have been offering this for a while. But, we’re now entering into the service provider space, looking at other services beyond connectivity. We’re launching Cloud Connect in direct response to our customers’ need for reliable, high-capacity access to public cloud services. As business-critical applications become more data-heavy, businesses require more reliable, efficient and secure connections. Our Cloud Connect service enables these businesses to connect directly with the award-winning cloud service providers of their choice."
Operating on a private dedicated Ethernet connection, Smith expanded on the added security their new service provides saying: “Because it’s a Layer 2, transparent service all of the customers' data traffic enters from their domain across our private network structure into the cloud service provider. So the customers may choose to put their own firewall services or encryption in place, but we leave that to them. We can’t see, interfere or do anything with that traffic as it goes across the network, and as we set up the private connectivity, it doesn’t touch the internet.”
The Cloud Connect service will be made available to customers as part of its price comparison engine, LIVEQUOTE. LIVEQUOTE generates quotes in real time for Cloud Connect in addition to dedicated Ethernet circuits using their own network and that of leading third parties.
“We take pride in the way we’ve developed our ability to give quotations. A lot of wholesale customers like to use us for reselling and using our network footprint for Ethernet services or wavelength services for their own customers. And likewise, I think we now see enterprises wanting to utilise more of that capability. LIVEQUOTE has the functionality where customers, so long as they’ve set up a presence with us through our sales team, will have their own secure portal login. They can direct quotes through the Cloud Connect service, they can also place orders through it, for their service.”
“As a connectivity provider, we see a sizeable amount of UK businesses looking to migrate legacy services to a number of different cloud or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments. It’s all about providing the customers with choice, we’ve seen the trends and industry commentary on it but hybrid cloud I think is where the sweet spot is for enterprise right now,” concluded Smith.
Earlier this year the company agreed a partnership deal with the Irish open-access operator Enet, which sees Enet leveraging SSE's dark fibre carrier Ethernet and optical networking services across its national network.
