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Can an off-premise, opex-model enterprise-grade hybrid or private cloud service give enterprise IT the same reliability, control and security expected in a traditional data center?

Citic Telecom CPC believes its infrastructure-as-a-service has made that a practical reality. It combines a Multi Protocol Label Switching Virtual Private Network (MPLS VPN) that extensively covers China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore with solution-based security services and several strategically located cloud service centers based on VMWare's vCloud architecture.

Having set up cloud service centers offering pooled computing resources in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, the company plans to open a center in Singapore later this year to enable customers to deploy solutions like global server load balancing or select the closest location for processing power.

"We see a lot of communication requirements between South Asia and China and Japan," said Daniel Kwong, the vice president of Information Technology & Security Services at Citic Telecom CPC, one of the first vCloud-powered partners in Hong Kong and China. "By deploying our cloud services center in South Asia, we can help customers to spread their processing load requirements."

"[When a Singapore-based customer] needs processing power in Shanghai, for example, they just define their requirements through a portal and more importantly, connect to their back-end or headquarters in Singapore without going through the Internet," Kwong added.

Nonetheless, for many of Citic Telecom CPC's Asia Pacific customers already using its security services and MPLS VPN, subscribing to cloud services should be a logical next step.

Invariably, the key consideration in adopting a cloud service is security. "We try not to rely too much on the Internet because of the security concerns," said Kwong. "Whether the customer has its private VMWare deployed or they are using pooled resources at our data center, they can seamlessly migrate their workloads via the standard vCloud infrastructure. That migration does not require Internet at all but goes through a private [MPLS] network."

Enterprises pay a monthly subscription fee based on number of pools instead of number of VMs. For example, a pool may offer 40GHz of CPU and 1TB of disk storage. The enterprise customer may then flow in 50 or 60 VMs, using the resources within the pool. "If they don't have enough resources, they can subscribe for additional resources or pools," said Kwong.