Introduction to IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect

IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect is a managed private connectivity service that links your enterprise network to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Zoom, IBM Cloud and other cloud and SaaS providers, without sending traffic over the public internet. It combines a dedicated network path, a managed cloud interconnect and a self-serve portal under a single contract and delivers secure multi-cloud connectivity as a service.

What is IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect?

IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect is a managed private connectivity service that links your enterprise network to public cloud and SaaS providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Zoom and IBM Cloud, among others) without sending traffic over the public internet.

You can think of it as three things working together:

A dedicated network path from your offices, data centres, or branches to a cloud provider’s edge.
A managed service layer that handles the underlying interconnect with the cloud provider, so you don’t need to procure your own colocation, cross-connects, or carrier circuits.
A self-serve portal for ordering, monitoring and modifying connections without raising tickets, provided through the TC^x Portal.

The connection itself is private. Your traffic enters the Tata Communications network at one of its points of presence, traverses the private backbone, and exits into the cloud provider through a dedicated interconnect - all under a single contract.

Why does IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect exist?

Enterprises moving production workloads to the cloud face three recurring problems with public-internet connectivity:

The internet is best-effort by design. Latency, jitter, and packet loss vary by route, time of day, and external congestion. For real-time applications - voice, video, financial trading, industrial control - that variability is unacceptable.

Public-internet egress is expensive. Major cloud providers charge per-gigabyte fees for data leaving their networks over the internet. At scale, those fees become a significant line item on the cloud bill.

Setting it up yourself is fragmented. A do-it-yourself approach to private cloud connectivity means sourcing colocation space, ordering cross-connects, contracting with one or more carriers, and managing each relationship separately. IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect collapses that into a single service.

How does it work?

At a high level, a IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect connection has three layers:

Customer underlay - how your site reaches the Tata Communications network. This can be an MPLS connection, an IPsec tunnel over the public internet, or a interconnection partner-network hand-off.
Private backbone - the Tata Communications global MPLS network that carries your traffic from the entry point to the cloud-side exit point. It supports the four standard deployment topologies (full mesh, hub-and-spoke, cloud-to-cloud and selected sites).
Cloud interconnect - the dedicated link from a provider-edge router into the cloud provider. For AWS this is a Direct Connect Hosted Connection; for Azure an ExpressRoute circuit; equivalent services exist for Google Cloud, Oracle, IBM and others.

BGP runs end-to-end across the path, exchanging routes between your network and the cloud provider. This is how cloud workloads reach your on-premises systems and vice versa, with route advertisements controlling which traffic uses which path.

Who is it for?

IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect is built for organisations that meet at least one of the following criteria:

Running production workloads in one or more public clouds where consistent performance matters.
Transferring more than ~1 TB per month between on-premises and cloud, where private egress is cheaper than public-internet egress.
Operating in regulated industries where data must not traverse the public internet.
Maintaining a multi-cloud architecture and wanting consolidated operations.
Extending an existing Tata Communications footprint to add cloud connectivity without re-architecting the underlay.

The five typical readers each find what they need in different sections:

Network Engineers go deep into routing and architecture;
Cloud Architects use the reference architectures and deployment scenarios;
IT Admins work in the TC^x Portal;
Developers use the APIs;
Compliance Officers review security and audit-log pages.

Where to start

Three good places to start, depending on what you’re trying to do:

If you’re evaluating IZO™+ Multi Cloud Connect: read Key Benefits and Supported Cloud Providers.
If you’re ready to provision: read Account Setup and TC^x Portal Walkthrough.