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Verizon is now providing a way for enterprises to select a growing number of well-known public cloud service providers and install them into one secure network package–a private onramp to public clouds, if you will.
HP Helion Managed Cloud Service and Salesforce.com on Dec. 16 became the newest public clouds to join Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI) ecosystem, introduced earlier this year. Including those two major providers, Verizon now connects securely to six leading cloud service providers; the service was already available to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and Verizon Cloud.
The SCI systems enables enterprises to rapidly scale and use multiple cloud services via a pay-as-you-go model. Verizon doesn’t serve as a cloud services “broker” of any kind; it merely offers users options of which clouds to choose.
The addition of Salesforce is significant because it’s the first SaaS offering available with Verizon’s SCI, enabling customers to connect to the Salesforce Customer Success Platform with cloud apps for sales, service, marketing, community and analytics.
Scale Up Bandwidth, App Performance and Service Ops
Enterprises using cloud services from HP or Salesforce will be able to tap into Verizon’s networking solution that features dynamic bandwidth allocation, strong security (encryption), application performance throughput and quality of service options. Rapid, on-demand provisioning reduces deployment time and maintenance requirements for Verizon SCI customers.
“Verizon SCI spins up unlimited bandwidth where and when the user needs it,” Shawn Hakl, Enterprise Networking Platforms and Managed Products for Verizon, told eWEEK. “This is very complementary, not competitive, to Amazon, for example.
“This also gives you a couple of things you didn’t have before; earlier, you were at the mercy of your Internet connect, which previously you had very little visibility on. Now you have complete visibility on your usage. Also, your data never touches the public Internet — it goes completely private (and is protected by a separate security layer in the onramp provided by Verizon). “
Verizon’s SCI service will offer pre-integrated wireless and IP data networking capabilities to the HP Helion Managed Cloud Service to help enterprise customers rapidly deploy a highly secure, reliable and scalable connection to HP cloud services, Hakl said.
The joint Verizon-HP package provides a multiple redundant platform, giving enterprise customers the ability to build, manage and consume numerous cloud services. With SCI, HP customers will be able to tap into flexible speed on demand and the ability to scale up and down, Hakl said.
Research Indicates Two-Thirds of Enterprises Using Cloud
A recent study, “State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014,” released by Verizon, found that 65 percent of enterprises are now using cloud IT and are increasingly moving more complex and mission-critical workloads to this environment.
The report also found that enterprises will continue to use a mixture of providers, partly to benefit from the best-of-breed values that different providers offer, and partly to avoid committing all their apps to one provider.