For years, iland has been leveraging the best technology we can find to underpin our cloud environments. Cisco UCS and networking technologies have always been core to our Enterprise Cloud Services platform, and to date, we’ve deployed them to eight data centers around the world – across the US, UK and Singapore. But now, Cisco has introduced a new program that brings together iland data centers – and others like iland — into a massive global Intercloud, and we could not possibly be more thrilled to have been included.

Why? Many reasons.

First, we recognize that for customers around the world, selecting a cloud vendor is a challenging, but also critical decision. So-called default options often fall down on manageability or security and compliance concerns. And, information about cloud vendors, their strengths and differences, is often difficult to find as well. When data is located, the information is often impenetrable. As a first stage, Cisco created the Cisco Powered certification for IaaS and DRaaS, which we have earned, to help businesses have confidence when selecting a cloud provider. Now with the Intercloud, providers are linked together in a network that significantly eases the adoption path for customers making the move to cloud.

Second, this group of cloud vendors demonstrates a real need in the market for cloud providers that can deliver exceptional SLAs, consistent performance, and enterprise-class service in support of real, production applications. Whether those applications are SaaS applications, in-house operational systems, or websites, most businesses are not looking to cloud simply to host their testbed and development workloads anymore – so more stringent requirements are at the fore. The breadth of the Intercloud network validates the need for these types of cloud services throughout the world.

Third, Cisco is providing an excellent foundation for workload portability, easing the shift from cloud-to-cloud, or from on-premise to cloud. On-boarding is often an area of great concern for customers, so the consistency of the platform will greatly relieve a common early barrier to adoption.

Fourth, Cisco has always been a strong advocate for global organizations that, like iland, act locally. In cloud, that means having local sales and solutions architects to guide the initial cloud decision – from architecting a disaster recovery (DR) plan to estimating resource requirements – and then, having in-region support personnel to address questions or concerns in a timely manner. Working with a global cloud should give you the strength of multiple locations, but you should not have to sacrifice the quality of service during sales or ongoing operations.

So, as Cisco announces this Intercloud strategy, iland is a proud member of that community, welcoming customers of Cisco to our cloud, and strongly supporting the benefits this move will have on the global cloud market as a whole.