I always start of every conversation about the cloud by saying “it’s the network stupid” to borrow Bill Clinton’s election phrase. The fact is while there’s been a lot of focus on the data centre – on virtualisation and blade servers – things that improve the capability and efficiency and the green house emissions of data centres. The fact is there wouldn’t be a conversation about cloud computing if it were not for the network.

The network is the key enabler and the network has to be fast enough, it has to be reliable enough and it has to have adequate coverage to make it something that people can build into their everyday work processes. And without that you have no cloud, but with it you have a transformational experience.

When you have a tele-presence session you obviously don’t want your picture becoming fragmented or pixelated because of other activity that’s going on in your network. So you want to be able to deliver the right quality of service. Now without application assured networking you would need to hold up a channel, pretty well permanently, irrespective of whether you’re using the network or not, to give you the required the bandwidth through the network and to assure that bandwidth.

With application assured networking you can invoke the bandwidth you need on demand and know that that bandwidth is not going to get interfered with by other applications on the network. So you only pay for what you need but you still get the level of assurance and quality that you want.

I’ve had numerous conversations with enterprises about whether they’re ready to go into the cloud and they all recognise the incentives for doing it: the varibilisation of costs, the reduction in power that they need to achieve for green house emissions and all those sorts of factors. But there’s always a certain amount of reluctance and nervousness which they have to overcome in order to do it.

For example the two things that often come up are reliability and security. Now reliability is a factor of the network – its capability both in terms of robustness and in terms of throughput and capacity. And we’re fortunate with our Next IP™ and our Next G™ networks that we have the capability to deliver high performing services across most of inhabited of Australia. So there’s very seldom an occasion that you can’t get access to the cloud.

The second issue is the discussion around security and people often ask me whether it’s less secure going into the cloud. But I’d actually argue it’s more secure going into the cloud because you’re able to leverage off the economy of scale that we have in terms of developing our security infrastructure and processes. And, you know, we have 300 to 400 people who work solely on security processes for our operations. We have to have those people. Very few enterprises, even the very largest ones, can afford to duplicate that type of capability and skill base that we have inside Telstra.