Verizon Business today unveiled its Computing as a Service (CaaS) product for mid-sized to large enterprise customers.
“CaaS’ combination of flexibility, security, performance and resiliency is well positioned to serve certain enterprise requirements in a nimble, next-generation fashion,” Melanie Posey, IDC research director for hosting and telecom services, said in a statement.
Verizon’s software, which delivers workflow and resource management, is the “brains of the system,” Joseph Crawford, Verizon executive director of product management, told InternetNews.com.
In a traditional enterprise software stack, a company has two of everything — firewalls, databases and servers — in order to deliver redundancy. But that resilience comes at a cost in management complexity, according to Crawford. The cloud allows service providers like Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to handle that complexity for the customer. But Verizon’s not alone in jumping on the cloud.
Today’s news comes as Gartner reported that the cloud computing market is about to get more competitive as new companies enter the fray. Indeed, on Monday, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), the largest independent consulting firm now that EDS is part of HP, announced its cloud offering.
Now it’s Verizon’s turn.
Cloud computing is appealing because applications are easier to deliver, but businesses have three key objections to the concept, each of which has been answered in CaaS, Crawford said.
Businesses fear that cloud and virtual environments are not secure, but Crawford said enterprise customers can rely on Verizon Business to meet those challenges. And Verizon’s MPLS network means that communications occur outside the standard Internet.
Enterprise customers fear that utility reporting will result in unexpectedly large bills, but he said CaaS has a built-in safety valve so that users stay on budget.
And customers like the automation of cloud and virtual environments but fear losing control of them, which Verizon has addressed by building many provisioning engines that give the customer control of their own subscription.
“Security and transparency are the themes that differentiate us from offerings like Amazon’s EC2,” Crawford said.
Familiar products
CaaS features some reassuring enterprise brand names.
Although the master of the stack is Verizon’s own proprietary software, CaaS is comprised of recognizable enterprise products. Crawford said that CaaS uses HP Opsware and its Virtual Connect product to interact with the blade system.
It uses the HP Systems Insight Manager for the hardware management platform. “Insight would query the inventory, and tell Opsware to execute the application on a specific blade system,” said Crawford.
CaaS uses VMware for virtualization and RedHat Linux and Microsoft Windows for the base operating system images.
Cisco delivers the firewall and load balancer in both physical and virtual environments. On the back end, storage is by 3Par.
Passwords are managed through RSA technology and can be delivered over the Internet or by physical tokens. Crawford was eager to point out that CaaS uses the highest level of security for passwords.
“When a customer creates a server farm, we generate a private key for the farm. We do not send user names and passwords through e-mail. They either get a private key from their laptop or key fob or they see the password in a secure encrypted browser window. This is the level of security our customers expect from providers like Verizon,” he said.
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.”
