Verizon Business announced that it has expanded its cloud computing portfolio with a new service for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Computing as a Service (CaaS) SMB provides customers with Internet-based access to virtual machines (VMs) that can be spun up or down as needed, via a pay-as-you-go model. This is in addition to Verizon Business's Enterprise hybrid cloud service announced at VMworld.
The service is based on a VMware Hypervisor cluster architecture with built-in redundancy and load balancing. Per a partnership agreement, the service runs on IT infrastructure and data centers run by Terremark. The service is backed with a service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees it will be accessible and usable 100 percent of the time, or Verizon will provide paybacks.
Customers can choose from VMs configured with variety of operating systems and more than 450 different server templates, as well as up to 16GB of storage. It offers server cloning, which lets organizations make a carbon copy of any server for backup protection, development version control or rapid deployment of additional capacity into load-balanced virtual web farms. The hardware load balancing capability allows capacity to be shared among a customer's virtual server farm.
Designed for smaller businesses such as retailers, manufacturers and professional services firms, online businesses, as well as independent departments within larger organizations, Verizon says Computing as a Service (CaaS) is also suited to application developers who want to code, test and stage in a reliable and scalable cloud environment.
Security is often a concern for customers, and Verizon says it has included secure protection for physical assets and a server interface that allows users to add additional layers of security as needed. For example, customers can choose to leverage the CaaS network firewall capabilities to cordon off the VMs, or, if the service is going to be used to support an online business, configure them to allow access to the public.
