SLT goes for cloud computing service

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), the premier ICT solutions provider launched its cloud computing service, 'akaza' recently.

The launch took place at the company's Customer Forum organised for government institutions, at Water's Edge, Battaramulla.

Akaza provides end-to-end cloud computing services empowering business organisations with enhanced agility, quick service delivery and cost efficiencies while providing maximum ROI and improved scalability.

Group Chief Executive Officer, SLT, Lalith de Silva said, "SLT's cloud computing solution akaza is definitely a paradigm shift in which Sri Lankan users store, access, and use data by remote means using the internet.

The state-of-the-art broadband deployment of SLT that promotes consistent, uninterrupted, high-speed internet is the single most important component for the success of cloud computing in Sri Lanka."

"Our ambition is to fuel GoSL's mandate for national economic progress envisioning a SMART Sri Lanka and going global with the SLT akaza cloud platform," he said.

"Today, around the globe, high-end enterprises, private and public institutions, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and micro businesses tap into cloud computing to lower their costs and increase productivity," de Silva said.

"We see a huge potential in this area coupled with SLT's superior broadband connectivity via FTTx, ADSL 2+, VDSL 2 and 4G LTE access technologies," he said.

Akaza is a full-fledged cloud platform that enables diverse businesses ranging from top enterprises, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), micro level business organisations and government institutions and mobile customers to leverage on SLT's vast ICT resources which includes being connected to the largest fibre optic backbone infrastructure in the country.

It eliminates the need for organisations to invest heavily in large servers, data centres and complicated software and technical experts, and thus gives organisations the freedom to focus their capital and energies on their core business.

With the current transformation that Sri Lanka is going through and the economic development in the country, akaza will help SMEs and micro level businesses to expand with economical infrastructure solutions and minimum capital investment.

The state-of-the-art services offered by akaza includes:

Infrastructure as a service (IAAS) platform that provides shared computing power to customers. SLT's IAAS platform is spread across the company's top tier internet data centres (iDC) at SLT headquarters and Welikada.

Through akaza, customers will be connected to SLT's enterprise block storage It comprises an easy to use, self service and web based management interface, which gives customers control on creating and managing their own virtual data centre and virtual servers.

It provides support for sharing disks between multiple virtual memories.

Dedicated firewalls and load balancers enhance security and distribute traffic among customers' dedicated cloud servers. SLT also has a dedicated Cloud Expert team to provide support and assistance to customers.

SLT will soon enhance cloud computing services to offer a range of other services such as platform-as-a-service (PAAS), software-as-a-service (SAAS) and desktop-as-a-service (DAAS) platforms to customers.