As more enterprises move their applications to the cloud, an opportunity for increased monitoring and visibility services is opening up at the intersection of mobility and cloud.
Allot Communications announced today that it is enabling multi-tenant cloud optimization for enterprise, with telecom operator Swisscom. The platform enables service providers to offer enterprises basic security features, better visibility into their traffic, and the ability to prioritize traffic, according to Yaniv Sulkes, AVP of marketing for Allot. Allot and Nokia Networks are supporting the Swisscom deployment of Allot’s Cloud Access Optimization solution, which was integrated into the operator’s new data center architecture and is aimed at helping enterprises deal with issues such as degradation issues posed by unified communications, real-time video loads, file transfers and endpoint upgrades.
IDC has predicted that the enterprise software-as-a-service application market will reach $50.8 billion by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 17.6% over the next few years. Along with that growth comes the desire for application visibility and control.
“Many enterprises are accustomed to defining performance visibility strategies for devices, services, and applications under their direct control,” as SevOne put it in a white paper on monitoring cloud infrastructure performance.  “The shift to ‘as a service’ models – especially SaaS models where network operations teams do not manage or control the network, servers, storage, operating systems of the service – creates a performance visibility challenge for most organizations.”
“Operators are getting more and more into cloud services for enterprise — in general, service providers see enterprise as key to their strategy,” Sulkes said. “As enterprises move into the cloud, the operators can really significantly augment their role in this ecosystem, and deliver visibility to the cloud applications’ delivery, control and quality of service, which is very important to business — and security, of course.”
Sulkes said that he’s in the midst of a real-world cloud transition: Allot is switching from private-network-based Microsoft Office to Office 365 in the cloud. That type of change means that instead of IT managers having control of user experience, performance and security because the software resides on their own network, new requirements must be put in place to ensure that those standards are maintained.
In the past, mobile service providers in particular have offered bundles and volume discounts, and that was about the extent of their enterprise-specific offerings, Sulkes said. But with the momentum of the cloud ecosystem and the mobility factor, he said, service providers have the opportunity to expand their role in the enterprise ecosystem as the provider of connectivity to the cloud. And the multi-tenant aspect of Allot’s solution is particularly important, he added, because enterprises want their IT staff to be able to customize how their view their network and applications.
“It’s a growing space,” Sulkes said. He added that while service providers such as AT&T and Verizon have had their enterprise units for a long time, those have not been traditional cloud operations — they were integration businesses and distributors.
“Now, with the cloud, they can merge their IT expertise with their telecom expertise,” Sulkes said.
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