Nokia has been focused on transitioning to a “cloud-first IT strategy”
Earlier this week, Nokia said it will be migrating its entire on-premises information technology infrastructure onto Google Cloud, including all of its data centers, servers and software applications, marking a massive win for the U.S. company.
Nokia has been focused on transitioning to a “cloud-first IT strategy” to improve employee collaboration and innovation, as well as speed up delivery of its services to customers. The company’s press release also stated that the agreement is expected to “drive meaningful operational efficiencies” and result in cost savings due to “a reduction in real estate footprint, hardware energy consumption and hardware capacity purchasing needs.”
Ravi Parmasad, Nokia’s vice president of global IT infrastructure, said the partnership with Google puts the Finnish company on a “digital transformation path” that will “fundamentally” change how it operates and does business.
“Given Nokia’s digital ambitions and plans,” Parmasad continued, “this is an ideal time for Nokia to be taking this step with Google Cloud to accelerate our efforts; and doing all of this in a secure and scalable way.”
Due to Nokia’s size, the transition to the cloud will be a massive task. However, Nokia said that it has been working with Google for the past few months to design a highly customized migration approach, which the company said will allow it to exit its IT data centers rapidly without too much impact on the business.
From now on, Nokia’s infrastructure and applications will run in the public cloud or in a Software-as-a-Service model, and the data migration has started and is expected to extend over an 18- to 24-month period.
Google Cloud has had a good summer. In July, Indian information technology services giant Wipro Ltd., soft drinks maker Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. and French telco Orange SA all migrated their data to Google’s Cloud, and then in August, Major League Baseball did the same, moving its enterprise data warehouse from its Teradata-based on-premises servers to Google BigQuery.