Azzurri Communications announces the launch of ICON (Intelligent Cloud Optimised Network), its new virtual network infrastructure. At ICON’s core is highly resilient, secure and scaleable network, overlaid with a flexible platform to support application delivery, communication and collaboration. ICON’s monitoring and insight capability will also ensure customers most effectively use the bandwidth capacity they are paying for. Azzurri’s intention with ICON is to become the first system integrator to offer customers a full ‘pay as you go model’ for data usage, or ‘Bandwidth as a Service’.

Currently, businesses have to adapt their network usage to suit the telco carriers’ contractual model (which reserves enough network capacity to cope with traffic peaks in order to meet SLA targets). This means businesses either pay far too much (for unused bandwidth in their contract) or experience network performance issues as they reach their contracted limits.

ICON will negate this issue by offering customers a suite of advanced monitoring services that covers the status of devices, monitors their health, gauges their performance and assesses risks. Azzurri overlays this with managed services for bandwidth and application optimisation (that have an impact on productivity and efficiency) as well as component services for mitigating risks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and Firewall and Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Protection Systems (IDS/IPS). Appropriate bandwidth is provisioned to support SLAs based on application delivery as well as traditional break/fix.

In addition to the core network and application delivery platform, Azzurri’s expert service delivery team will assist in managing the infrastructure as a key business asset for its customers. The key features of ICON are:

•         An architecture for structured application delivery of business applications: because connectivity is cost, but networks need to be assets
•         A converged network  for communications: centering on IP Telephony,  Contact Centre and Unified Communications
•         A multi-service platform: communications and collaboration platform including multi-tenanted, hosted and  cloud services offered on capex or opex basis
•         A resilient and extremely flexible infrastructure: based on Cisco Service Provider class hardware that can be moulded to individual business requirements
•         A highly scaleable architecture: Up to half a terabyte capacity initially, scalable to 10s of terabytes on demand

Mark Quartermaine, CEO, Azzurri Communications, said: “ICON enables Azzurri to deliver significant value to our customers based on our main asset, the experience and expertise of our employees.  That’s why we’ve made a substantial investment to create this new, highly scaleable core network on which to deliver a wide range of services. We want to help our customers transform what currently equates to network costs for them into a valuable business focused asset.”

ICON’s connectivity services include circuit bonding for resilience and performance and Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service (CoS) to support data, video and voice with Azzurri’s Unified Communications and Contact Centre applications and video deployments. Azzurri will also work with partners to bring a range of compliance and conformance services to market for ISO27001, PCI and Data Protection and others.

Rufus Grig, Chief Technology Officer, Azzurri Communications, said: “Our network customers tell us that their primary consideration is keeping their critical applications performing. Of course they also want the guarantee that their core network is resilient, which ICON provides. But the enhanced value that ICON provides is to help customers ‘sweat and protect’: to make the most of their network assets by using what they pay for, while still mitigating threats and risks to their critical applications and services.”