Speed. Scale. Agility. They're the top priorities of every modern business, and the cloud promises to deliver them. What businesses don't want is more costs and complexity. They don't want to have to use different processes to develop and manage applications depending on whether they live on-premises, or in private or public clouds.

Bottom line, businesses want a consistent experience. They want to be able to provision workloads wherever they choose, on a workload-by-workload basis. And they want to be able to do it in the same way, with the same platform.

It's a big ask. But today, leading cloud service providers like Optus are making it happen with the Cisco Cloud Architecture for Microsoft Cloud Platform.

Raising the Bar for Cloud Services

Optus is one of the premier IT and cloud service providers in Australia, serving customers in practically every industry, from small businesses to large enterprises. That kind of diversity is great news for Optus' business. But meeting the unique needs of all those diverse customers can be a tall order.

"Optus' challenges are speed, agility, and costs," says Joseph Smith, Director of Products, Cloud Business, Optus. "Every customer has been asked to do more with less. Do it faster. Do it more often. And don't break anything. We need to deliver a platform that gives our clients speed and agility, but in a way that's controlled, that provides clarity of workloads."

Optus is using the Cisco Cloud Architecture for Microsoft Cloud Platform to give customers more choice, flexibility, and interoperability. The platform combines Cisco's world-class cloud data center solutions with Windows Azure Pack. And it makes it easy for Optus to deliver comprehensive hybrid cloud solutions-faster and more profitably.

Consistent Experiences Across Clouds

With the combined Cisco and Microsoft platform, Optus can offer a wide range of pre-integrated services-database as a service (aaS), desktop aaS, even backup aaS. And they can provide a consistent experience for all of them, no matter where customers deploy a workload.

"We can now deliver the same experience on our cloud versus Azure, and enable our customers to seamlessly move workloads between them in a hybrid fashion," says Smith. "It's so fast, so quick, so easy to deliver. And it's blurring the lines between what's on our cloud, what's on the public cloud, and what's in the customer's environment."

This flexibility is a huge boon for development. Customers can start developing an application on premises and then push it out to the public cloud, or vice versa. They don't have to take on the additional effort-or costs-of separate development efforts for each environment. They can use a single governance, management, and security structure that spans all cloud models. And they retain the flexibility to pick and choose the right platform for each workload.

That consistency and flexibility has become a major differentiator for Optus' cloud business. And with the ability to scale the platform from small architectures to the largest organizations, Optus can meet the needs of a broader range of customers with a single cloud framework.

Partnering with Cisco for Hybrid Cloud

Optus and its customers will only continue expanding their cloud capabilities. As they do, they will continue to benefit from the combined strengths and support of Cisco and Microsoft.

"What I find most exciting about this solution is that we not only get what we develop in our own R&D, but also the solution sets that Cisco and Microsoft bring to the table," says Smith. "One of the key benefits we get from that relationship is Cisco's investment in R&D and technology. It's the breadth and depth that Cisco brings to the table that helps us cover any area, from the networking server to cloud software. It's a very comprehensive portfolio and very deep."

Learn More

For more details about how Optus is using the Cisco Cloud Architecture for Microsoft Cloud Platform, watch the video below.

Find out what the Cisco Cloud Architecture for Microsoft Cloud Platform can do for your business and customers here.