Enterprise customers considering IT services often face some difficult tradeoffs: They can go with a public cloud offering, and accept the potential limitations on customization and localized control that implies. Or, they can build new IT services on premises, a process that's often more complex, expensive, and resource-intensive.  Today, service providers like TELUS are offering a better option: on-demand hybrid cloud capabilities that can keep data and security onsite, while offering the speed and flexibility of the cloud. TELUS just announced a major hybrid cloud service offering in Canada, giving its customers the ability to integrate public and private cloud services, as well as on-premises infrastructure, through a single portal. And the secret sauce behind TELUS' versatile new cloud offer? It's Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform.

A Growing Market-With Growing Expectations

As a leading Canadian provider of advanced telecommunications services, TELUS was seeing huge demand from its customers for cloud services. These customers arefacing growing complexity in their IT environments, and unprecedented data demands driven by new mobile, social, Internet of Things, and Big Data applications. They see the cloud as a key tool to reach new markets and deliver new solutions faster, at a lower cost, and with less risk. But in many cases, they still need the reliability, security, and data sovereignty that comes with traditional IT services.

With Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform, TELUS can give customers the best of both worlds. They can deliver both private and public cloud IT services in TELUS data centres and Microsoft Azure public cloud, with the ability to seamlessly move workloads from one to the other as customers choose. Customers can select the best solution on an application-by-application, or even workload-by-workload basis. They can ramp up new capabilities faster, with the ability to set up new environments in minutes through a cloud portal. And they can optimize costs and streamline IT resourcing by shifting responsibilities to TELUS managed cloud services wherever it makes sense.

Partnering for Cloud Success

If it sounds easy, that's because Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform was designed to make it that way. It brings together cloud technologies from two of the global leaders in the field, Cisco and Microsoft, into a pretested, pre-integrated cloud platform.  The solution combines Cisco hardware and the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking framework with the Microsoft Windows Azure Pack. It includes pretested and pre-defined service templates for a wide range of Microsoft cloud services that can be turned up or down very quickly, even on demand. TELUS can provide infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS), database as-a-service, disaster recovery as-a-service, and many other in-demand cloud offerings very quickly. They can even give customers cloud-based dev environments, so they can develop new apps in the Microsoft Azure cloud globally, and easily migrate them to their private cloud environments in Canada.  All of this is pre-integrated at the engineering level by Cisco and Microsoft. This shortens time to market for TELUS and allows their customers to get new services up and running in days or even minutes. Meanwhile, TELUS can deliver customers the full spectrum of cloud options-public, private, or hybrid-with the ability to manage all of those applications and workloads, wherever they reside, from a single pane of glass.

A Better Way to Cloud

These new IT-as-a-service offerings powered by Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform are coupled with TELUS network, security and cloud advisory services. The result: TELUS can bridge the divide between on-demand cloud speed and scalability, and traditional IT control. And TELUS customers gain the confidence that comes from working with three trusted technology leaders: TELUS, Microsoft, and Cisco. So they know their critical business services will work as expected.  All of this means that TELUS can continue growing its cloud portfolio, while empowering its customers to be more agile and better able to respond to new opportunities. Because whatever IT service or infrastructure customers need, TELUS can deliver it at the speed of the cloud, and help bring new capabilities to market much faster.

Learn More

TELUS is just one of the cloud providers using Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platforms to power new business benefits for its customers. Watch the video above to learn more. You can find more stories of the platform in action here.