Numergy and the Secure, Sovereign Cloud

March 31, 2014

French cloud provider Numergy provides cloud services to enterprises from start-up to large accounts and public sector. Numergy provides its services through a channel of more than 100 partners, including VARs, system integrators and corporate resellers.
Numergy, led by SFR and Bull, is one of 2 consortiums funded by the French government through the National Fund for a Digital Society. Their mission: to build a “sovereign cloud” that serves consumers and businesses, first in France and then in Europe, and to ensure the location and privacy of sensitive data in compliance with the laws of France and the European Union (EU). And they are doing so with help from Alcatel-Lucent's Nuage Networks™.

Protecting Data in the European Union

Why is is a sovereign cloud important?
In a word: Privacy.
In the European Union (EU), personal data storage restrictions are complex. European data-sovereignty laws, for example, require organizations to keep all of their customer data in the customer’s own country. Financial data must be stored for at least 7 years.
And the confidence of corporate CIOs in cloud security, compliance, regulation and governance remains low.
These challenges make it difficult to develop and manage a cloud environment that interacts across national borders or even other continents.

Ensuring Security in the Cloud

Author Nicholas Carr predicted in 2003 that cloud computing utilities were as inevitable as the 20th century spread of power utilities.
Today, he is calling on the IT industry to redouble its effort to overcome CIO fears regarding security in the cloud.
Numergy is answering that call by providing a national cloud platform to support the consumerization of the IT industry while meeting national guidelines.
In doing so, they must expand. Their datacenters and their infrastructure will become more distributed. And the more distributed the infrastructure, the more important it is for its constituent parts to be reliably interconnected. And this, in turn, requires an automated, programmable network that can scale effectively while supporting mandatory user guidelines.
To meet this need, Numergy has turned to software-defined networking – or SDN – and the SDN products offered by Nuage Networks, Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN venture. These include Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform and 7850 Virtualized Services Gateway, as well as Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 Service Router.
With the Nuage Networks SDN products in place, Numergy’s network will have programmability and automation under a comprehensive policy framework that gives them full control and visibility. They’ll be able to meet their security and compliance guidelines and use all of their compute assets more efficiently.

Why Nuage Networks

Nuage Network provides a powerful, multi-tenanted policy and service engine backed by analytics. Numergy will be able to create service templates, and then assign permissions to those templates.
For example, if Numergy wants to deploy a web server application, they can take that template and instantiate it simply, without worrying about IP addressing, what the network is doing, or what protocols are running in the background. Everything happens automatically, whether the assets are within a single datacenter or between datacenters.

Virtualized Computing in the European Union

Cloud technologies are in demand by both consumers and businesses. While most CIOs plan to move to the cloud to achieve cost savings and increase productivity, those in European markets are raising economic, social, and technical concerns.
Numergy’s cloud initiative addresses those concerns. And it ensures the competitiveness of organizations in both the public and private sectors in France and across Europe.
With Nuage Networks’ SDN products as a part of their infrastructure, Numergy can address the virtualized computing services that are essential to the effective operation of businesses today. And they can do so in a way that guarantees the independence, security, confidentiality, and proximity of information.