Azzurri Communications launches ICON

UK: Azzurri Communications has launched the ICON (Intelligent Cloud Optimised Network), its new virtual network infrastructure.

At ICON’s core is highly resilient, secure and scaleable network, overlaid with a flexible platform to support application delivery, communication and collaboration. ICON’s monitoring and insight capability will also ensure customers most effectively use the bandwidth capacity they are paying for. Azzurri’s intention with ICON is to become the first system integrator to offer customers a full ‘pay as you go model’ for data usage, or ‘Bandwidth as a Service’.

Currently, businesses have to adapt their network usage to suit the telco carriers’ contractual model (which reserves enough network capacity to cope with traffic peaks in order to meet SLA targets). This means businesses either pay far too much (for unused bandwidth in their contract) or experience network performance issues as they reach their contracted limits.

ICON will negate this issue by offering customers a suite of advanced monitoring services that covers the status of devices, monitors their health, gauges their performance and assesses risks. Azzurri overlays this with managed services for bandwidth and application optimisation (that have an impact on productivity and efficiency) as well as component services for mitigating risks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and Firewall and Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Protection Systems (IDS/IPS). Appropriate bandwidth is provisioned to support SLAs based on application delivery as well as traditional break/fix.

In addition to the core network and application delivery platform, Azzurri’s expert service delivery team will assist in managing the infrastructure as a key business asset for its customers. The key features of ICON are:

* An architecture for structured application delivery of business applications: because connectivity is cost, but networks need to be assets.
* A converged network for communications: centering on IP telephony, contact centre and unified communications.
* A multi-service platform: communications and collaboration platform, including multi-tenanted, hosted and cloud services offered on capex or opex basis.
* A resilient and extremely flexible infrastructure: based on Cisco Service Provider class hardware that can be moulded to individual business requirements.
* A highly scaleable architecture: up to half a terabyte capacity initially, scalable to 10s of terabytes on demand.