Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), the premier ICT solutions provider launched its breakthrough cloud computing service, akaza, raising the bar in cloud computing in Sri Lanka to new heights. The launch took place recently at the company’s Customer Forum organized for government institutions, at Water’s Edge, Battaramulla, “akaza” provides end-to-end cloud computing services providing business organizations with enhanced agility, quick service delivery, and cost efficiencies whilst providing maximum ROI as well as improved scalability. Mr. Lalith De Silva, the Group Chief Executive Officer of SLT commented, “SLT’s cloud computing solution akaza is definitely a paradigm shift in which Sri Lankan user’s store, access, and utilizes data by remote means using the Internet. The state-of-the-art broadband deployment of SLT that promotes consistent, uninterrupted, high-speed internet is the single most important component for the success of cloud computing in Sri Lanka. Our ambition is to fuel GoSL’s mandate for national economic progress envisioning a SMART Sri Lanka and going global with the SLT akaza cloud platform."akaza is a fully fledged cloud platform that enables diverse businesses ranging from top enterprises, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), micro level business organizations and government institutions as well as mobile customers to leverage on SLT’s vast ICT resources which includes being connected to the largest fibre optic backbone infrastructure in the country. It eliminates the need for organizations to invest heavily in large servers, data centres and complicated software as well as technical experts, and thus gives organizations the freedom to focus their capital and energies on what they do best - their core business. With the current transformations that Sri Lanka is going through and the economic developments in the country, akaza will especially help SMEs and micro level businesses to expand their businesses quickly and easily with economical infrastructure solutions and minimum capital investments.SLT akaza comprises of an easy to use, self service and web based management interface, which gives customers control on creating and managing their own virtual data centre and virtual servers. akaza is hybrid cloud enabled, and has a reserved network performance up to 500 Mbps, a reserved storage performance up to 5000 IOPs and also provides support for sharing disks between multiple virtual memories. Dedicated firewalls and load balancers enhance security and distribute traffic among customers’ dedicated cloud servers. SLT also has a dedicated Cloud Expert team to provide expert support and assistance to customers around the clock, 365 days of the year.The distinctive feature of akaza when compared to the cloud computing services available in the country at present is the easy to use, self managed web-based portal that provides maximum flexibility to organizations, allowing them to select the exact amount of resources they require – be it storage, computing power, RAM, software etc. as and when it is required. This also supports “Pay as you go” and “Pay as you grow” models.