Verizon Set to Enter Cloud Storage Market

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-Verizon Communications, which has had the physical setup for online data storage for a long while, finally joined the cloud storage services crowd June 15 by introducing its own branded enterprise offering.

Verizon's business services arm is using the well-established Nirvanex core system to provide the basic Verizon Cloud Storage service and is adding a suite of data-retention IT consulting services to go with it.

Verizon made the announcement at the IDG/IDC Cloud Leadership Forum here at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

The service will become available in the United States and 16 countries beginning in July. It enters the market against a flock of competitors such as Amazon.com's Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Google's new Gdrive and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

Among the key features are industrial-strength physical and logical security, including secure multitenant file system and encrypted data transfers, Joe Crawford, Verizon Business's executive director of IT solutions product management, told eWEEK.

The service supports multiple methods for accessing stored data, including software, APIs and third-party applications. It also offers enterprises the option of selecting where data is stored, Crawford said.

"We started this [project] up over a year ago, but we wanted to make sure we differentiated ourselves first before we were ready to launch," Crawford told eWEEK. "We think that our added consulting services and the global reach of Verizon [do] set us apart."

Verizon Cloud Storage will follow a pay-as-you-use scheme that scales on demand and can either augment traditional storage options, such as SAN (storage area network) and NAS (network-attached storage), or be used as a stand-alone option, Crawford said.