• The SD-WAN portal is Colt’s differentiation, it claims
• It’s offering all your multi-cloud connections with a single view 
• The same policies, same reporting structure on each connection

To Brits a Colt is a cute little baby horse, to Americans the word most likely conjures up the image of a handgun, but in telecoms it’s a European network provider with roots in the City Of London, hence the name. Today Colt wants its name to be associated with ‘SD-WANS for Multi-cloud environments’. 

Colt Technology Services has today announced that it’s smartened up its SD WAN (software defined wide area network) offering with a focus on multi-cloud connectivity. SD-WAN is a segment that many service providers are targeting, but an opportunity to make such offers cleverer and more fit for modern purpose has presented itself with the relatively recent trend towards ‘multi’ cloud (hybrid cloud but involving more clouds). 

This innovation (if one cloud is good, then 3 or 4 must be terrific) means another loading of complexity has to be negotiated by enterprises wanting to become cloudified to the max, and another opportunity to sell tech and services to overcome the complexity which thereby presents itself.

For Colt, the opportunity is to position its SD-WAN multi-cloud offering as a single connection to multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), including cloud-to-cloud connections, over SD WAN. This, says Colt, will naturally ensure enhanced security, agility and latency compared to connecting via the public internet - the usual SD-WAN advantages.

But Colt says it’s taken things a step further by simultaneously upping the total multi-cloud management abilities by providing what it’s calling an ‘intelligent portal’ as a gateway service into the multi-cloud world. 

It seems to have attracted the approval of one of the prime multi-cloud boosters: “Enterprises are increasingly embracing hybrid and multi-cloud approaches, allowing them to deploy applications faster and run mission-critical applications on the infrastructure best suited to their business needs, as we’ve seen with the success of Google Cloud’s Anthos,” said Kevin O’Kane, Managing Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. “We’re pleased that Colt will expand its capabilities to enable businesses greater connectivity across multiple cloud environments.” So there’s that.

According to Mohit Manral, IP Product Manager at Colt, it’s really a case of enabling customers to get the same benefits they’re used to on MPLS, on their multi-cloud.

“So that means security, WAN optimisation and traffic steering capabilities and so on, so that in the end you get a reliable connection and one that we can offer with an SLA.”

This is full-stack and we’re offering it as a portal, he says. “So now the customers will be able to see all their WAN sites on a single view.”

You need to consider more than ‘only connect’ 

Connections are one thing, but if you want a uniform seamless experience there are multiple layers to consider, points out Mohit. 

“If you want to use multiple clouds you want it so you don’t have to transition between media or different methodologies. In effect the portal is the differentiating factor for us. It means our customers will be able to see all their WAN sites - doesn’t matter what sort of sites they are, - they can go into the portal to look at the analysis, the reporting and the data, and will be able to copy/paste the policies from one site to another. So it’s an easy way to manage a cloud infrastructure ih a coherent way without having to look at several products from multiple vendors. 

“It means that their connections to AWS will be the same as their connection to, say, Azure - same policies same reporting structure. The idea is that we are able to provide a seamless experience for the multi-cloud environment.”