Why Everyone’s Talking about the Cloud
Improve time to market. Scale capacity to meet market demand. Reduce capital expenditures and control operating costs. These options often create competitive advantage, and your IT organization no doubt plays a key role to make it happen. But traditional methods of over-building an IT environment to meet these goals can stretch budgets and strain data centers. Increasingly, IT leaders are looking to cloud computing to make a real difference in business performance and boost that advantage.

The growing number of cloud computing solutions in today’s marketplace represents different levels of service for a wide range of computing requirements. Understanding the different approaches to cloud computing, and how one or more can serve your operations is critical to making the right choice for your needs.

A Strategic Transition Plan
It is true that even early adopters to new technologies are cautious when it comes to cloud computing. The shift to a cloud environment requires a carefully orchestrated plan – a step by step transition – to achieve efficiencies without disrupting business operations. When considering a move to the cloud environment, today’s IT leaders should keep four key areas in mind:

• Security - IT leaders are understandably sensitive about allowing customer information, business data, legal documents, or trade secrets to reside outside the company’s firewall. Where will the data be stored and how will the computing infrastructure be secured and protected? You’ll need to understand the policies, the processes, and the governance model of the cloud computing provider – and they should adhere to the same standards you would impose in-house.

• Flexibility - One key advantage of cloud computing is how you can shape the solution to fit your operations. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing when moving applications into the cloud. Some companies choose to maintain one part traditional hosting – keeping a fully dedicated hardware-based solution running core IT systems, and one part virtual – an on-demand solution to create environments for staging, migrations, or parallel builds. You need to assess how much flexibility is necessary to achieve both your business and operational goals – and choose a provider that can effect that balance.

• Capacity On-Demand - A significant advantage of cloud computing is the control it gives you over capacity usage. Seasonal data traffic spikes? High-demand applications? Dial up or dial down your capacity as your business demands. The cloud eliminates the need for over-provisioning and the unnecessary hardware, software, maintenance, and electricity costs it creates. And simple and transparent usage-based pricing can make it possible to better align IT costs to corporate revenue streams. You’ll want to consider what drives your usage fluctuations, so your provider can build those factors into your solution.

• Control - A key area of focus in the cloud is the ability to allocate control of resources directly into your hands. Concerns about control might be better assessed in terms of what is actually necessary to support the business. Will onsite control over physical hardware move the business forward, or is it more important to control how those budget resources might be reallocated to support vital business objectives? You need to evaluate what’s truly driving your business, and determine where those controls will have the greatest benefit.

Verizon Business’s approach to cloud computing
Cloud computing should be a flexible, enterprise-ready solution that provides dynamically scalable resources and secures the data that is delivered to and from the virtual environment. We designed our Computing as a Service (CaaS) using our global IP backbone, wrapped in layers of security, giving you the choice of virtual and physical architecture. CaaS goes beyond most existing cloud computing offerings to address security requirements and provide the flexibility, reliability, and control you need. And it’s all backed by competitive service level agreements.

• CaaS provides on-demand provisioning of physical and virtual resources, so you can tap into computing capacity when you need it. It features a high level of automation that enables self-provisioning in hours, not days.

• Instead of rigid cost structures, CaaS allows you to pay for data center resources like application hosting and storage, based on the amount of resources you consume. This simple and transparent pay-per-usage approach makes it possible to better align IT costs to corporate budgets and customer demands.

• CaaS also gives you control over the way IT supports the day-to-day needs of your business. You have visibility into your “cloud” of Verizon Business resources and retain control over when and how those resources are deployed.

• Finally, our comprehensive security measures - from the physical security of our data center, security of customer portal access, and logical security of individual environment – offer you peace of mind knowing your data is well protected in its journey to and from the cloud.

Our Investment in the Cloud Continues
You need high performance and low latency throughout your operation. To that end, we continue expanding our cloud-computing deployment resources around the globe. We maintain CaaS capabilities in both our U.S. and European infrastructures, and we plan to expand our CaaS footprint to the Asia-Pacific region, giving you the flexibility to choose the location that best serves your business.

We know your data is your business and you need to trust the provider who takes your infrastructure into the cloud. You can put your trust in us -- Verizon Business has been providing hosting solutions for more than 15 years and supports customer applications around the globe.

Let us talk with you about taking advantage of the computing capacity within the cloud. Whether now or in the future, moving only a little of your infrastructure or a lot, we have the knowledge and experience to build the right solution for you.

To Learn More about Verizon’s Computing as a Service:

• Visit us on the web at http://www.verizonbusiness.com/thinkforward/cloud/
• Download our white paper: Cloud computing - Marketing hype or sound business strategy?
• Download our executive summary: The case for cloud computing is becoming more clear