• Colt joins the Google Cloud crowd, offering flexible on-demand access
• Is offering fat connections to wherever their Google cloud instances are located

Colt has upped its current relationship with Google Cloud to support ‘direct, on demand connections’ to the Google cloud globally. Colt says its Dedicated Cloud Access, (DCS) allows customers to connect any of their buildings or data centres to wherever their Google Cloud instances happen to be located. Colt claims its approach will get customers attached to the cloud at lower cost and with appropriate latency and assurance than if they were to rely on Internet connections.

Colt has also added an ‘on demand’ feature which means customers can flex their bandwidth requirements up and back again without recourse to legacy service delivery and its notorious long lead times. 

Colt says its IQ Network includes a 100Gbps optimised, owned network, distributed to more than 900 data centres and more than 27,500 buildings around the world. 

The arrangement is not an unusual one. In fact we’ve noticed similar announcements being made all the time. In June this year Telefónica’s B2B arm added Google cloud to its existing multi-cloud offering and said its ambition was to  simplify the complexity of customers’ hybrid cloud environments by unifying them into a single, simple, secure and flexible management environment.

Other parts of the increasingly complex cloud ecosystem are also converging onto various sorts of multi-cloud support. VMware, for instance, has just highlighted its ambitions for the hybrid cloud, which it sees itself supporting and it too had, just last month, announced a new service - Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple - to allow organizations to run their VMware workloads on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

It’s by this time interesting to speculate where the cloud connectivity market goes from here.

I asked  Peter Coppens, Vice President of Product at Colt, whether he saw an opportunity looming where Colt doesn’t just provide premises-to-cloud connectivity using the conventional access network model (and charging accordingly), but eventually moves into explicit public/private hybrid cloud support, where the Colt network links an on-premises private cloud workload or workloads to an array of public clouds? It could be working with a hybrid cloud platform specialist like VMware as a partner?

He can see that developing but, he says, there’s still a way to go. “I can’t say we see it yet -  but it is arriving,” he maintains.

What is a palpable, says Peter Coppens, is the growth Colt is seeing as the cloud continues to expand. While the bulk of cloud connectivity is still over the Internet the way costs are structured means there is a place for Colt to offer economical service to the larger customers with less latency and greater performance assurance on top. Although of course he sees smaller customers beginning to come on board as well. 

He says this is a very fast growing market and Colt is seeing more than 60 per cent growth in its own cloud connectivity. Most important to Colt is its ‘on demand’ feature, not just to Google but to other public clouds. This is a real draw for corporates.    

“By partnering with Google Cloud to provide direct, on-demand connectivity to its cloud environment, customers get access to a cloud networking experience that helps drive cost efficiencies and increases bandwidth throughput,” says Peter.