MUMBAI: Verizon has today announced Verizon Cloud - its new cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform and cloud-based object storage service. With this service, Verizon is fundamentally changing how public clouds are built. Large enterprises, mid-size companies and small development shops will get the agility and economic benefit of a generic public cloud along with the reliability and scale of an enterprise-level service with unprecedented control of performance. The public beta for Verizon Cloud will launch in the fourth quarter of this year.

“Verizon created the enterprise cloud, now we’re recreating it,” said Verizon Enterprise Solutions president John Stratton. “This is the revolution in cloud services that enterprises have been calling for.  We took feedback from our enterprise clients across the globe and built a new cloud platform from the bottom up to deliver the attributes they require.” Verizon Cloud has two main components: Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage. Verizon Cloud Compute is the IaaS platform. Verizon Cloud Storage is an object-based storage service.

Verizon Cloud Compute is built for speed and performance. Virtual machines (software-based computers and servers) can be created and deployed in just seconds, and users build and pay for what they need. With Verizon Cloud Compute, users can determine and set virtual machine and network performance, providing predictable performance for mission critical applications, even during peak times. Additionally, users can configure storage performance and attach storage to multiple virtual machines. Previously, services had pre-set configurations for size (e.g. small, medium, large) and performance, with little flexibility regarding virtual machine and network performance and storage configuration. No other cloud offering provides this level of control.  

In addition, while Verizon built the solution for enterprises, it also meets the needs of small and medium businesses, individual IT departments and software developers. “This is a breakthrough approach to how cloud computing is done,” said The Weather Company chief information officer Bryson Koehler.

“Weather is the most dynamic dataset in the world, and we also use big data to help consumers better plan their day and help businesses make intelligent decisions as it relates to weather. As a big data leader, a major part of The Weather Company’s go-forward strategy is based on the cloud, and we are linking a large part of our technical future to these services from Verizon.”
Rob Walters, chief technology officer at Engine Yard, a Platform as a Service that lets developers plan, build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud, said: “The new Verizon Cloud will give us ease of deployment and flexibility with full enterprise capabilities, saving us time and money. We’ve had a long and successful relationship with Verizon. We’ve deployed some of our most demanding enterprise-grade applications on Verizon cloud infrastructure to deliver the high scalability and reliability required for business-critical apps running on Engine Yard.”