Verizon

Overview

As cloud computing continues to pick up momentum and more organizations start to look at it as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise computing, the cloud provider landscape is changing as well. Along side early pioneers like Salesforce.com and Amazon and new upstarts like GoGrid and Heroku, technology incumbents are increasingly getting into the mix. The latter group is intriguing because of their history and their large installed base. Whether they can take advantage of these two elements remains to be seen.

Verizon is one such company. While they may not leap to mind when it comes to cloud computing, a closer look reveals they should be able to take advantage of their position. In fact, the company has been in the game for 20 years. In 1989, they were the first commercial service connected to the internet and then, in 1999 one of the first to remotely manage applications. Over the years, they've learned not only how to deliver IT services to enterprise customers, but what those customers expect in terms of security and reliability.

When it came time to enter the cloud computing market, Verizon did so with an enterprise mindset. Verizon Computing as a Service (CaaS) is a fully secure, enterprise-ready, cloud computing service for on-demand server resources. As a result, customers get the same level of security and reliability that they're used to with the company's traditional network services so they can spin up (and down) servers as the business requires, knowing that enterprise-class performance is "baked in" to the service.

Value Proposition

Verizon breaks down its value proposition across three key areas: security, reliability and control. The company states that security is "built into" the Verizon CaaS infrastructure with "high-level security controls with a choice of IP connections to the platform and redundancy built into the environment to meet the security, performance, and reliability demands of enterprise systems". Both physical and virtual servers can be provisioned, which allows the business to automatically scale capacity as needed.

Control is maintained via the Verizon CaaS customer portal "a central hub for all customer provisioning and management activities that offers an easy-to-use, Web-based interface with self-service and reporting functionality". Verizon then backs the entire service up with SLAs that include 100% availability. Customers can also choose to either manage the systems themselves or hand off management to Verizon.

Products & Services

Verizon Computing as a Service (CaaS) provides on-demand, pay-as-you-go, server resources (both physical and virtual) targeted at enterprise customers who require security across the provider's data center, customer portal, and the company's own environment. Virtual firewalls and load balancers are included as part of the total package. Verizon CaaS is controlled through a browser-based interface that allows for self-provisioning, decommissioning and transparent visibility into the environment. Their application management tool allows for automatic provisioning of server, storage and network resources.