Telstra turns to cloud for own application resiliency

Telstra is turning to the cloud to provide 'burst' capacity for an undisclosed number of enterprise applications that make business transactions possible.

Erez Yarkoni

Chief information officer Erez Yarkoni told iTnews on the sidelines of Association & Communication Events' Connect 2015 conference that the carrier is looking to increase the resilience of applications that underpin specific transaction types.

"We identified those business transactions that we want to make sure we have that type of capability for," Yarkoni said. "We're moving aggressively".

Yarkoni noted that a transaction "doesn't live on just one application" - meaning multiple applications might contribute to the completion of a single transaction with Telstra.

Some of these applications are classed as "major" - such as those that enable customers to use network services. These applications already run in an active-active configuration for resiliency purposes and will continue to do so.

But other smaller applications - of which there are hundreds - will soon be able to burst onto cloud services if the internal infrastructure they use nears its capacity limits or faces some other operational hurdle.

Yarkoni's team is in the process of "containerising these sub-applications" and the data they hold to prepare them for this new resiliency structure.

"In case of a disaster, we can burst into a cloud," he said. "So I don't have to own the infrastructure, I don't have to run it active-active, but I still have resilience."

Yarkoni took on the CIO role at Telstra in February. He also retains his previous role as Telstra's head of cloud, in addition to his new responsibilities.

"It helps a lot that I come from a place where I basically was selling people the value proposition of cloud, because I'm sold on it myself," he said.

Aside from using the cloud for application resiliency and disaster recovery, Yarkoni said he was driving a "cloud-first" policy agenda internally. "All 'net new' [applications], all migrations, go to cloud," he said.

Yarkoni's comments provide a first glimpse into internal IT operational strategies under his rule. He has previously talked only about his vision for the CIO role, although he is responsible for managing Telstra's vast IT network.

Ry Crozier travelled to Connect 2015 as a guest of Nuage Networks.