Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions (IS) has launched a new, on-demand portal that allows business customers to buy access to local and global cloud computing platforms.

The “aggregated cloud services portal”, called SkyLight, provides access to cloud platforms operated by Internet Solutions, Dimension Data, Amazon and Microsoft.

IS MD Saki Missaikos said the company has spent the past two years developing SkyLight.

He said that SkyLight, and services like it, will free IT departments from managing physical assets like servers and data centres.

With a single login and with one interface, SkyLight offers on-demand access to cloud services from Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Internet Solutions Cloud and Dimension Data Cloud, with others to follow, IS said. Pricing to the international services is the same as companies would pay directly for access to those platforms.

“Enterprises can select one virtual environment for their entire business, or select different environments for different departments, deployments or workloads. Provisioning or decommissioning machines as need dictates — whichever the platform — happens instantaneously via the portal,” said Andrew Aitken, executive for cloud services at IS.

“No longer must enterprises commit to a single platform that may not be ideal for their requirements, or face the laborious tasks of optimising and collating services across multiple platforms,” said Aitken. “This is probably the single biggest issue that enterprises grapple with when taking their data to the cloud.”

Through the SkyLight interface, users can select and deselect the cloud services that their business and their workload needs, he said.

SkyLight offers security and performance management functions across all virtual environments and on all cloud platforms, including monitoring of firewalls, networks, usage and load balancers, IS said.

Custom permissions, detailed audit logs and roll-back functionality are built in. This makes it easy to maintain proper levels of IT governance in the virtual environment, it said.

Companies can scale up or down their data requirements instantly. “This flexibility means that business is not negatively impacted by delays on physical infrastructure or by paying for cloud services that are no longer required,” said Aitken.

“Instead of purchasing infrastructure based on requirements and financial projections decided years ago, through SkyLight an enterprise pays only for the IT services it needs, when it needs it, and at the appropriate scale.”

SkyLight users will receive one consolidated bill — in rand — with detailed usage statistics for all provisioned virtual environments and cloud platforms.

Missaikos said that although SkyLight has been launched on four cloud platforms, IS is keen to offer access to more international and local cloud services, including from competitor providers in South Africa.

“We are absolutely open to the rest of them. Some are very keen [to participate]… We are keen to speak to all of them,” he said.