Verizon Aims To Take Its Enterprise Expertise Into The Cloud
By John Panagulias, submitted by John Panagulias, Monday, December 7, 2009, 9:16PM
I sat down with Verizon's Joe Crawford, executive director for IT solutions and hosting product management and development, to learn more about the company's cloud computing strategy and offerings. Verizon already provides application hosting and managed services to some of the biggest companies on the planet. Their strategy, according to Crawford, is to take what they've learned over the last 20+ years in the areas of enterprise-class security and reliability and package it up as the foundation for their cloud computing services.
Verizon Computing as a Service (CaaS) is the company's first cloud-based offering. Verizon CaaS provides on-demand, pay-as-you-go, Web-based provisioning of physical and virtual servers to customers looking to add infrastructure resources to their data center. (Verizon CaaS is synonymous with infrastructure as a service (Iaas); some have argued Verizon's naming convention is more accurate.)
But, the point that Crawford wants to get across is that his company understands the critical requirements that enterprise customers have in terms of security, transparency and connectivity. Without these requisite performance characteristics, customers simply won't accept cloud computing services into their corporate environment. To that end it, Verizon has taken its expertise in secure and highly reliable networking and data center operations and built their CaaS solution around that foundation.
"Verizon CaaS brings cloud computing services to the enterprise in a way that allows them to consume compute resources on-demand with the added features and functionality that an enterprise needs in terms of security, transparency and connectivity", Crawford explained.
To emphasize his point he went on to explain that "because security is a top priority for enterprise customers, we've examined and validated our environment's security controls, policies and procedures against a stringent set of information security standards. The Verizon CyberTrust Security certification represents one of the tangible proof points we bring to customers". Furthermore, CaaS combines security controls with a choice of IP connections to the platform and redundancy built into the environment to meet the requirements of enterprise customers.
When it comes to transparency, customers have the ability to directly control their resources through a Web-based customer portal. In addition, they have visibility into, and can audit, Verizon's security and performance policies based on the customer's specific needs and environment. Connectivity and reliability are ensured through a combination of topologies, such as multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), and a workflow and resource engine (called the "Core") that allows computing resources to be dynamically allocated, reconfigured, moved, while ensuring that server failover is established quickly in the event of a problem.
Taken all together, Verizon's first step into the cloud computing arena establishes it with a good foothold. Future plans include an on-demand storage offering.
Read our profile to learn more about Verizon.
