NGD Cloud Gateway for Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute has gone live. This follows successfully completed testing with Microsoft at NGD’s mega data centre located in the Cardiff Capital Region.
NGD is already working with a number of existing data centre customers looking to take advantage of its new high performance cloud connectivity service and is also receiving strong interest from organisations located elsewhere.
Cloud Gateway ensures cost-effective dedicated private network connections into Azure are quickly established between NGD’s facilities and customers’ on-premises locations or colocation data centres. Bypassing the public internet can reduce bandwidth costs and ensures greater reliability, higher availability, and predictable performance.
“We are very pleased with the initial response to Cloud Gateway from several of our large systems integrator, service provider and enterprise customers,” said Nick Razey, NGD’s CEO. “They have various cloud projects in progress with hybrid cloud applications being especially high on their agendas which make highly secure low latency connections and predictable performance top priorities, as evidenced by the keen interest in our Cloud Gateway service.”
Clive Longbottom, Head of Research at analyst firm Quocirca added: “As organisations are beginning to discover, the future is hybrid cloud. With different workloads requiring different platform capabilities, more organisations will be looking to specialised providers in which to house or run certain workloads, such as HPC. However, such systems still need to be able to interoperate with the rest of the world – yet being at the mercy of the public internet is not a good idea. The use of specialised and dedicated interconnects, such as Azure ExpressRoute, provide the means to create the required optimised overall platform.”
Available now, customers can order virtual cross-connections to the Microsoft Cloud using Layer 2 connections which can be scaled up to 10 Gbps to meet immediate and future capacity requirements with provisioning of multiple connections as necessary.
