Enterprises using Tata Communications as their connectivity provider will now be able to send their traffic to Oracle cloud services privately without using the Internet.
This is possible after the Indian network provider added support for Oracle’s FastConnect feature.
FastConnect was earlier universally available only if you used connectivity from players like AT&T, British Telecom (BT), NTT and Equinix.
The feature allows customers to avoid exposing their sensitive data to the Internet by routing it through a private network.
Without it, enterprises have to rely on either an expensive, direct leased line or fall back on ‘virtual private network’ or VPN to connect their various offices with cloud applications hosted by companies like Oracle, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Azure.
This is required as cloud-based applications like Gmail do not run on the company’s servers, but on those of service providers like Salesforce and Amazon, often located hundreds of miles away. These apps are accessed by corporate employees remotely using a network such as the Internet.
In case of VPNs, data is still sent over the public internet, but through an encrypted ‘tunnel’. Third parties such as hackers and spy agencies can still ‘see’ the data that is being sent from one office to the other, but are not able to decipher it as it is encrypted.
However, some enterprises — such as banks — worry that it may be possible to decipher the data if sufficient computing power is utilized. Such enterprises, therefore, often stay away from the use of cloud computing-based solutions.
Services like FastConnect alleviate worries for such organizations, and promise to take their data over dedicated channels, and not ‘mix’ it with Internet traffic at any point.
Tata Communications, which has customers in over a 100 countries, was already providing such a service, known as IZO Private Connect, for its customers using Salesforce.com cloud applications, and has now extended it to include Oracle cloud services as well.
An added advantage for the service is increased speed as such dedicated links have very high bandwidth.
“With 10 Gbps connectivity, IZO Private Connect ensures a predictable and consistent end-user experience for bandwidth-intensive applications regardless of location or device, while helping to safeguard businesses against external threats,” the company said.
“As organisations become increasingly dependent on the cloud and the threat of cyber-attacks continues to grow, our customers need a network that gives them ubiquitous, secure access to data and applications,” said James Parker, Chief Revenue Officer, Tata Communications.
Besides Oracle, Tata said it has tie-ups with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud. It has the ability to provide direct connectivity to over 110 data centers using the feature, it said.