Verizon Business Joins the Cloud Computing War - Page 2

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The service

CaaS "lets customers provision both physical and virtual server environments to best accommodate the type of application being deployed -- a key differentiator of the service," Verizon Business said in a statement.

"For example, a business may want to use a virtual environment for staging and development. For business-critical applications, such as database servers, businesses may choose a physical server infrastructure that lets them customize servers as well as select from a range of server configurations," the company added.

The CaaS customer portal is designed to deliver ease of use and intuitive functionality. "You can create a server in three windows," said Crawford. "Enter the name of the server, choose between a physical and virtual server, and then choose the specifications: Windows or Linux, the amount of memory and storage for virtual servers, or choose between profiles for hardware servers."

Security is a very important feature, too. "Security has been built into all levels of the CaaS environment," Verizon Business said in a statement.

Verizon Business can deliver security for CaaS and it can also reach into a customer's environment, if asked, C.J. Sallitta, Verizon executive director of global security services, told InternetNews.com.

"We knew security was key from the beginning," he added. "We wanted to eliminate any objections."

Verizon acquired Cybertrust in 2007 and owns a complete Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).

"With the Cybertrust security team, we have a seamless solutions and go-to-market team," said Crawford. "We can do what our customers need us to do. We can do application scanning, and the MSSP is within this offering."

As for compliance, Crawford said that Verizon data centers are certified SAS 70 type 2 and customers have access to the objectives against which those audits were conducted. Data centers also meet HIPAA and PCI compliance targets for Verizon Business customers, he added.

Pricing is flexible and was not announced at press time. CaaS is available today in the North America. The first instance of CaaS is in the state of Maryland, with Amsterdam scheduled for September and deployments in London, California and the Asia Pacific region scheduled for 2010.

CaaS will also grow as Verizon Business' partners deliver new features. Crawford said that he's particularly interested in a planned VMware feature that will allow servers to move not only within CaaS between physical and virtual environments but also between CaaS and other environments.

Verizon Business has a long list of planned enhancements that will be announced over time, Crawford added.

The demand for flexibility is clear across all verticals, Crawford concluded. "I just met with an insurance company in the UK. They use 100 servers for one week every quarter to run models. They achieve a competitive advantage by running models on their risk every quarter. The competition may run models only once, right after the policy is launched."

The ability to increase the number of servers the company uses had obvious appeal. "When I showed them how our offering could enable them to turn up and then turn down systems, the head of IT said it was exactly what they were looking for."