The document discusses the issue of latency in cloud computing and how it has prevented many enterprises from fully utilizing public cloud services. It describes how direct connections from a company's datacenter to cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services' Direct Connect, can eliminate latency by bypassing the public internet. TelecityGroup's new Cloud-IX platform also provides these direct connections and has demonstrated a 50% reduction in latency for a financial company migrating over 100 applications to AWS. Direct connections may finally allow enterprises to overcome latency concerns and take cloud computing more seriously.

1. Is the time
right for cloud?
Latency in the cloud – a CBR special report
www.cbronline.com
In association with

2. Cloud latency
Computer Business Review | www.cbronline.com2
C
loud’s biggest problem may not
be what you’ve been hearing
for years: security. Instead,
especially when it comes to enterprise
utilisation of public cloud in particular,
the issue is actually that of ‘latency.’
What is latency in this context, and
why would it be an issue for
consuming and using technology
remotely? Put at its simplest, latency
in the enterprise IT sense is the time
that it takes for messages to traverse
the network (and back). But the type
of latency you need to care about is
even simpler: bad latency. If your
message suffers as little as 20
milliseconds (1/1000th of a second)
delay, it’s been proven, you are
looking at a 15% plunge in Web page
load time. That’s possibly annoying,
but not fatal. If bad latency means you
are too late to make a sale or a buy if
you’re a City firm, game over.
When did we start worrying about
latency? Only recently, for most of us.
Pre-Internet, latency was more or less a
direct function of the capacity of your
organisation’s own networking assets, in
the shape of the physical routers and
switches that composed your topology. If
you had an application that demanded
fast response – especially in financial
services, where milliseconds can literally
make the difference between transaction
success or failure – you simply looked to
beef up the network until you achieved
the desired run-rate.
It’s a lot less simple in the age of
the Web. By its very nature a massively
distributed ‘network of networks’ using
all manner of connectivity options, the
public Internet is not going to cut the
mustard for the kind of quality of
service most enterprise apps demand.
If you could basically write an equation
to deliver latency expectation by
mapping signal time between router
hops when you owned all the routers,
imagine trying to do the same if
possibly hundreds of routers, none of
which you might have access to, make
up the network you’re now using.
But can’t we expect a superior
level of service from hybrid or private
cloud, where more of the
infrastructure is custom-built and
SLAs (service level agreements) are in
place to guarantee desired speed?
Alas, it’s not that simple. Packet
delays can and do occur all over the
map here, even in private cloud, due
to architecture choices (use of
virtualisation), what’s been politely
characterised as the ‘evasiveness’ of
cloud service providers as to the
specifics of the performance profile
you are actually going to get on a
daily basis, a lack of specific network
management tools for IP-based
networks and so on.
The ‘net’ result (if you’ll pardon the bad
pun): cloud is dismissed by most CIOs as
anything like a serious delivery option for
mission-critical systems, certainly for the
time being. But we posed the question,
why would this be an issue for cloud
customers? It’s not like there’s been a
mass desertion of the approach, after all.
The simple answer is that it hasn’t
probably cropped up yet. Many
Don’t Let Latency Derail
Your Cloud Ambitions
If you have only put minor services out on the cloud yet, you may not have started to worry
about latency yet – but when you do hear about it, chances are it will make you pause
about further investment. TelecityGroup says that technology already exists that means
you don’t have to – as it will make latency as weak an anti-cloud argument as ‘security’

3. Cloud latency
Computer Business Review | www.cbronline.com 3
organisations are happy to commit
lower-criticality applications to the cloud,
after all. You probably do it yourself
without even really noticing: you
probably deploy email spam filtering,
where you happily contract with a third-
party to provide scanning of their
incoming electronic mail - not caring
where it is based or how delivered, so
long as the filtering gets done.
But that’s a prime example, says
David Hall, Commercial & Strategy
Manager at Internet experts
TelecityGroup, of a low-latency
application: as CIO, you are not putting
many critical eggs into any kind of a
cloud basket. “Most organisations are
comfortable with using a cloud-based
service of this level as email is not
expected to be real-time - and so some
time delay in the network is really
almost irrelevant.”
And while organisations might be
comfortable to look at putting email
itself - perhaps using an Office365
cloud approach from Microsoft - into
the cloud, they are much less
convinced that systems that need
sub-second responses back could be
safely hosted in the public cloud as it
now stands.
Unless there’s some revolutionary
second generation of Internet
technology, then, public cloud looks
destined to remain a minority sport for
most enterprises, though presumably
bad latency isn’t that much of an
issue for consumers. (This becomes
less of a barrier to public cloud if you
are working with a service provider
that will offer you use of its own
network, of course.)
That is in fact pretty much how
things stood until a company you
might have heard of called Amazon
decided to see if bad cloud latency
could be better dealt with.
True cloud service transparency
In 2011 Amazon, a major player in public
cloud, of course, with its AWS (Amazon
Web Services) service, announced
something called Direct Connect. The
technology allows you as the customer
to skip over the entire public Internet
and hook up a direct private network
If bad latency means you are too late to make a
sale or a buy if you’re a City firm, game over.

4. Cloud latency
Computer Business Review | www.cbronline.com4
connection from your building or data
centre to Amazon’s cloud. And Amazon
is already convincing a lot of people that
this could be a great way to curb latency
problems by providing a consistent,
predictable level of network performance,
with the user being able to set rules for
what sort of traffic gets prioritised.
For TelecityGroup’s Hall,“AWS Direct
Connect means you can know exactly
what performance you will get, what data
centre is being used, what location – all
the information you need to plan exactly
what applications could use that network
speed, in other words. This takes away at
a stroke a lot of the issues that CIOs say
they have with the cloud, as they can
inspect what’s actually going on. It also
means that you can get the level of
connectivity you feel appropriate and
most suitable, which means you can start
exploiting a lot more of the Cloud’s
attractive features beyond just using it for
low-level stuff like your email filtering.
“If you’ve been holding back from
looking at the public cloud because of
the latency issue, technologies like
Direct Connect have started to open the
door and remove the barriers,” he adds.
As it turns out, TelecityGroup itself
has decided to step in and follow the
Direct Connect lead (the company is also
a European partner firm for the AWS
solution, incidentally). Step forward what
seems like a very promising technology:
its own ‘Cloud-IX’ platform.
Cloud-IX – the cloud-neutral
‘ecosystem’
Towards the end of last year
TelecityGroup announced technology
that will beat the network complexity
and latency issue in the shape of its
‘cloud-neutral’ solution, Cloud-IX.
The idea is to offer direct
connectivity for customers that want
to work with such cloud platforms as
Amazon Web Services, virtualization
giant VMware’s global cloud provider
of the year, iland, CSC’s cloud offering,
as well as those of Fujitsu and UK
cloud computing and unified
communications player Outsourcery.
Cloud-IX has taken up the AWS
Direct Connect baton, then, with its
promise to help customers maximise
the efficiency, flexibility and security
of their hybrid cloud endeavours by
establishing dedicated network
connections from their private or
managed infrastructure into any of
these premier level cloud providers.
The technology will also help CIOs
make properly informed choices around
the deployment of their applications,
without restrictions due to data
sovereignty or vendor lock-in. And by
integrating hybrid structures with the
cloud providers of your choice, Cloud-
IX will allow data centre managers to
seamlessly connect to and between a
TelecityGroup has announced technology that
will beat the network complexity and latency
issue – Cloud-IX.

5. Cloud latency
Computer Business Review | www.cbronline.com 5
range of cloud partners, physical
infrastructure and networks, all as part
of the carrier-neutral data centre
providers own digital ‘ecosystem.’
At the time of the Cloud-IX
announcement TelecityGroup’s CEO,
Michel Tobin, commented, “Cloud-IX
[combines] premium carrier neutral
data centres to house existing mission-
critical infrastructure with access to
the key global cloud platforms.”
That’s going to be of great interest, he
added, to any European enterprise in any
vertical sector that’s been struggling with
working out how to maximise the power
of the cloud to enhance the performance
of their core platforms, manage big data
and deliver what he frames as “enhanced
and scalable service offerings:”“Key to
solving this challenge is building flexible
solutions that utilise the elasticity and
economic benefits of the public cloud
alongside existing IT infrastructure, all
with direct connectivity into local and
international carriers.”
Sounds very promising. But can
Cloud-IX deliver – and could it indeed be
the way to leapfrog the latency barrier
that could stop more organisations make
anything more than a token step into
using the power of cloud?
Direct cloud connection –
in action
The answer seems to be yes, judging by
the highly suggestive experience of a
beta customer of Cloud-IX - a leading
City of London based wealth
management group.
The organsiation, which has asked
for confidentiality as to its identity
due to the competitive advantage it
says it’s reaping from the system, is
building out a hybrid cloud in two
TelecityGroup UK data centres that it
is convinced will allow it to drive
internal efficiencies by delivering
essential business applications
quickly, reliably and to-scale.
What part does Cloud-IX play in
delivering on that vision? The company
in question is deploying the system to
port more than 100 of its core business
applications, ranging from customer
relationship management (CRM), all of
its desktop apps and email, over into
the Amazon Web Services cloud.
As a result, it’s achieving a whopping
20 times bandwidth compared with its
previous architecture, when its IT
infrastructure was connected to AWS
via the public Web alone.
And as for latency? That has been cut
by over 50% - a very impressive step-up
in delivery time compared to just using
the common or garden Internet, patently.
Key to making the solution work is the
consistent latency experience (jitter)
delivered by Cloud-IX.
The speed of delivery and
scalability that this FTSE 250
organisation is getting from the power
of a direct connection into AWS, it
confirms, means that its business is
able to provision IT workloads on
demand without ever running over-
inflated operational costs.
And it’s an approach that is also
increasing the reliability and
resilience of its business applications
overall, which means its team can
work that more efficiency. “Utilising
AWS’s Public Cloud with
TelecityGroup allows us to achieve
the most effective and efficient
connection between our private
infrastructure and Amazon’s public
cloud,” the company told CBR.
Time to take cloud seriously –
at last?
Examples like this early Cloud-IX
customer’s success spell out one clear
message to TelecityGroup’s Hall: it’s
time to stop letting vague worries like
‘security’ impair your company’s ability
to fully exploit highly-promising options
such as hybrid or public cloud.
“I worry that too many CIOs I talk
to use the word ‘security’ to mean ‘I
don’t want to lose control,’” he states.
“In many ways, companies like
Google or Amazon, the kind of people
you’d want to work with in the cloud,
have more security experts on the
payroll than you do anyway.
“The door that Direct Connect has
opened and Cloud-IX is opening further
now needs to be pushed open – allowing
you to plan for which applications are
right for being delivered over the cloud
so that you can start saving cost, achieve
greater flexibility and functionality and
let you, as the organisation’s IT leader,
focus on the real value-add stuff, not
the plumbing.”
Could it be time for latency to stop
holding back your cloud ambitions?
It’s definitely starting to seem that way.

6. Sales enquiries
Please call +44(0)20 7001 0101 or email sales@telecity.com
Corporate address
TelecityGroup UK Limited
10th Floor, 6/7 Harbour Exchange Square
London E14 9GE
United Kingdom