With attention on satellite latency and broadband speeds increasing, satellite operator SES recently announced Cloud Direct in a blog post, a service to provide dedicated high-performance connectivity to multiple cloud providers from any global end-point.  “One hop” service away from cloud applications is the SES message.

SES currently offers broadband connectivity from a fleet of geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites and the medium earth orbit (MEO) O3b mPOWER constellation, providing customers multiple options on how to route traffic in terms of geographic coverage, cost, performance, and redundancy.

Last fall, SES announced a partnership with Microsoft to connect the Azure cloud directly to O3b satellite connectivity by colocation its ground stations next to Microsoft data centers.  SES spent two years working with Microsoft to become an Azure ExpressRoute and Azure Orbital partner, providing customers low-latency access to the cloud regardless of their platform or location on earth.

Cloud Direct should be a win-win for both companies, since satellite-using customers will get one-hop access to Azure and SES can provide low-latency, high-bandwidth services over O3b mPower.  Future expansion of Cloud Direct will include expanding partnerships to other cloud providers, since enterprise operations typically spread data and workloads out across multiple services based on region, function, use case and/or redundancy/resilience purposes.

In addition, SES expects to improve connectivity from its existing ground station gateways into cloud provider domains to improve performance.  Expect to see SES showing up at more interconnection locations around the world with bigger pipes and taking less hops through third-party transit services.