Verizon Business has gotten into the cloud computing game with a Computing as a Service (CaaS) offering for dynamically allocating virtual storage and server resources.
Using its data center capacity, Verizon’s CaaS allows users to sign up for, provision and manage IT resources via a Web-based portal, adding or deleting virtual servers, network, storage and backup services as needed and paying only for the resources consumed.
The portal, which includes extensive reporting capabilities, can also provide management access to any physical servers they may have, and to resources from other providers – a critical differentiator considering that many companies will have physical data center resources in place they may want to retail for various reasons. 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.
Among the business benefits in CaaS is a reduction in provisioning time from weeks to minutes, and the on-demand nature makes CaaS ideal for ad-hoc or seasonal applications. For instance, it’s ideal for businesses with new development projects, major events, mergers and migrations, retailers ramping up for holidays, companies holding annual benefit enrollments, or sales promotions that drive incremental traffic to Web sites.
CaaS also allows companies to do internal charge-backs for resources consumed by individual departments or business units and provides a foundation for IT expansion.
Joseph Crawford, executive director of product management and development for IT solutions at Verizon told us that cloud computing is a disruptive model that isn’t just for SMBs looking to cut costs. “This is also appropriate for large and medium enterprises, and the government vertical,” he explained. “As we move to an ‘everything-as-a-service’ model, IT is becoming a utility delivered through the cloud. IT resources are merely business enablers. That’s changing both IT and service provider business models.”
He noted that the cloud services market is expected to grow from $46.4 billion in 2009 to $150.1 billion by 2013.
As for pricing, Verizon offers utility-based pricing based on daily usage that “follows well-understood industry usage metrics for each resource,” it said. For a subscription model, the customer pays a $525 non-recurring charge for setup, $250 per month to subscribe to the service, and usage charges.
Verizon is also offering discount pricing options for monthly volume commitments starting at $2,500 per month.
