Cisco and Steria offer cloud in 30 minutes

Cloud computing

Steria is entering the cloud market with the help of Cisco infrastructure, declaring a quick and easy way to embrace the technology.

The business services company has joined forces with the network giant to offer a platform as a service (PaaS), which the companies claim can be set up in less time than it would take to watch an episode of Eastenders.

Called Infrastructure on Command, the service is automatically provisioned online for both long and short term projects in less than 30 minutes.

The pay model sticks to the popular "pay as you need" device used by many cloud firms, allowing for scalability both up and down without the cost of extra infrastructure.

Karine Brunet, director of industrialised service lines at Steria, said in a statement: "Infrastructure on Command enables us to provide secure and reliable platform access, while enabling our customers to address their business challenges in terms of cost containment, cash optimisation and time-to-market." In addition to touting the savings in costs and the speed of provisioning, the companies also claim the service can lower energy consumption by up to 30 per cent, giving customers a green glow as well as more money in their pockets.

Laurent Blanchard, general manager of Cisco France, said in a statement: "Cloud computing profoundly transforms the way in which information and IT services can be consumed."

The service is set to go live in June this year.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.