Finnish kit vendor Nokia has decided to save a few euros by migrating its on-premise IT infrastructure to the Google public cloud.

There are several upsides to a move like this. As well as the cost savings that come from not having to manage your own datacenters, Nokia also gets to bang on about how ‘cloud-first’ it is and might even learn a thing or two about the telco cloud, mobile edge computing, etc. On the other hand it will be dependent on a third party for a hell of a lot of its infrastructure.

“Nokia is on a digital transformation path that is about fundamentally changing how we operate and do business,” said Ravi Parmasad, VP of Global IT Infrastructure at Nokia. “This is crucial for how our employees collaborate so that we continue to raise the bar on meeting the needs of our customers.

“We are very pleased that Google Cloud, with its engineering and operational excellence, is joining our transformation work to help us deliver on the many goals we have set. Given Nokia’s digital ambitions and plans, this is an ideal time for Nokia to be taking this step with Google Cloud to accelerate our efforts; and doing all of this in a secure and scalable way.”

“It’s an honour to work with Nokia to help modernize its infrastructure on Google Cloud,” said Rob Enslin, President at Google Cloud. “We look forward to bringing our leading networking, data analytics, AI/ML, and other technologies to empower Nokia to deliver a cloud-first strategy and better serve its customers.

“We are excited to help Nokia revamp its IT infrastructure with our backbone network and our approach to data security, using advanced software-defined networking. We look forward to providing the full menu of our capabilities to help Nokia deliver on its cloud-first strategy and reach its performance requirements.”

The deal is being positioned as a five-year strategic collaboration, but Nokia is hoping the migration itself, which has already started, will take 18-24 months. Turning a profit has been a bit of a struggle for Nokia in recent years, so this deal makes sense on a lot of levels. Necessity being the mother of invention as it is, the move may even bestow some additional competitive advantages, so you can bet Ericsson will be keeping a close eye on the situation.