Verizon's On-Demand, Pay-As-You-Go Cloud For SMBs

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.Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of consulting firm THINKStrategies, says the various cloud computing services all have a level of security built in, and that there haven't been too many instances where that security has been breached. "So the security should be sufficient for most organizations' day-to-day needs," he adds.

To sign up, customers need only visit Verizon's Medium Business web site; there are web pages that explain the service as well as an 'Order Now' icon that takes them to a portal where they can order, pay for with a credit card, provision and manage the service online. The service is available now in the United States only.

Once signed up, customers can add to or change the resources they selected, or decrease them anytime, to meet their needs, all through the web-based portal that includes point-and-click mechanisms for provisioning and managing the service. Billing is based on hourly increments, and the service starts at about 3.7 cents per hour, which consists of one server with a standard OS and a little bit of additional storage. Verizon says it expects the typical customer will pay about 5-7 cents per hour for the service. There is no minimum, according to Verizon.

"This is another indication of the determination of Verizon, and the telcos in general, to play a role in the rapidly evolving cloud market," says Kaplan. "And Verizon, with this offering, is going after the particular segment of SMBs who are not necessarily comfortable with the commodity cloud offerings of Amazon or Google, which lack the kind of human interface that they are used and support that they expect. What Verizon is hoping to do is not only make it easy for SMBs to acquire the services with the self- provisioning mechanism but also give them a great level of confidence, reliability, security and support they want."