SITA and Orange Business Services to build global cloud computing infrastructure

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM: SITA, the air transport industry IT specialist, and Orange Business Services, the leading global integrated communications service provider for businesses, have agreed to jointly build a global, high performance, managed cloud computing infrastructure. Each partner will use this infrastructure to deliver its cloud services portfolio to its markets with added global reach, reliability and minimum latency.

The cloud computing infrastructure will be based on six seamlessly interconnected Tier III+ and Tier IV data centers in five continents, in Atlanta, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney.

Each data center will cover its respective region and will be interconnected via Orange’s high-speed MPLS network. Over this infrastructure, Orange Business Services and SITA will offer their individual portfolio of cloud computing services, encompassing infrastructure as-a-service, platform as-a-service, desktop as-a-service, and software as-a-service. Both Orange Business Services and SITA will continue to own the service relationships with their end customers.

The infrastructure will deliver high performance cloud computing services globally. Network connections between the data centers are secured with premium levels of protection against malicious threats. Highly resilient service is ensured through redundant connections, failover sites, and network-based intelligent re-routing that can transfer traffic around any disruptions, leading to significantly higher performance levels between the data centers. The two companies are aiming to achieve no more than 100 milliseconds of latency when their customers are operating their applications in the cloud.

Rollout of the infrastructure has already started with the data centers of Atlanta, Frankfurt and Singapore being fully operational in Q1 2012 and all six data centers in Q3 2012.