Executive Summary The case for cloud computing is becoming more clear. Cloud computing has been a hot topic lately, and for good reason. With it, companies can gain potential competitive advantages that could make a real difference: shorter time to market, services that can be quickly turned up or down, and reduced upfront IT costs just to name a few. Yet despite its continued evolution, concerns remain. Is cloud computing secure? Will it provide reliable availability? Can an organization maintain control over business-critical systems and data that exist in the cloud? In short, is it an enterprise-ready solution that can deliver on all the hype? Verizon Business Computing as a Service (CaaS) addresses the issues that have been holding organizations back from exploiting the full potential of cloud computing, making it a viable option that is ready for the enterprise. CaaS removes the obstacles to cloud computing Until now, cloud computing solutions have suffered from a number of shortcomings that have limited their use in the enterprise. Chief among these is that they typically fall short on security, offer inadequate levels of reliability, or limit user control over systems in the cloud. Enterprise decision makers are aware of these problems. According to a recent CIO.com survey, 60 percent of respondents believe vendors have not adequately addressed security concerns around on-demand offerings. Additionally, respondents expressed worries about availability (25 percent), performance (24 percent), and control (26 percent). 1 Before you can commit your organization to a cloud computing implementation, you need to be sure that what you get from the cloud is rock solid: servers and storage standing ready to meet your needs; security you can trust; network connections that perform; dynamic management tools that enable you to adjust services to meet your demand. CaaS is an on-demand computing solution that provides secure, reliable access to critical systems. CaaS can provide your team with a cost-effective way to quickly turn server, storage, and computing resources up or down in response to your day-to-day business needs. CaaS goes beyond most existing cloud computing offerings to address a broader range of complex business requirements. Our capabilities include: Built-in security, networking, and redundancy. CaaS combines our own high-level security controls with a choice of IP connections to the platform and redundancy built into the environment to meet the security, performance, and reliability demands of enterprise systems. Virtual and physical server capacity on demand. CaaS can handle both. This reduces the need to provision infrastructure based on peak capacity projections or traditional redundant configurations. 1 Cloud Computing Survey, CIO Magazine, August 2008.
A high level of performance in cloud computing. Current cloud computing solutions are varied. Some are geared toward smaller enterprises with limited capabilities and choices while others present solutions that are difficult to connect to and configure. By contrast, CaaS is an on-demand computing service that gives your team an easy-to-use management portal to architect your solution along with the security and control that your business requires. A high level of automation that enables self-provisioning in hours, not days. Using our self-service portal to dynamically provision and manage server, storage, and network resources, deployment times can be measured in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks. Competitive service level agreements (SLAs). All clients receive competitive SLAs including 100 percent availability of the portal and virtual farm, regardless of management option. Those clients choosing to rely on Verizon Business to manage their servers rather than doing it themselves receive additional SLAs such as 100 percent server availability and specific response and resolution time frames. Of course, the promise of cloud computing is meaningless unless it provides tangible business benefits. As an on-demand computing model, CaaS offers a number of important business benefits, including: Better IT support for your business. Quickly provision infrastructure and applications. Scale capacity up and down in synch with the natural cycles of your business. Easily respond to market conditions while maintaining control over your infrastructure configuration and capacity. Greater financial control and risk management. Eliminate large future capital outlays to launch new applications. Take financial risk in monthly increments by transitioning from a capital expense model to an operational expense model. Business Need Examples How CaaS Can Help Highly scalable computing capacity Temporary computing capacity Success-based growth Operational empowerment Retail seasonality, special promotions HR events, benefits enrollment, employee surveys Finance events, end-of-month closing Staging Development Migrations, parallel builds Software as a Service Start ups Affordable high availability Multiple business segments Global service delivery Mergers and acquisitions Turn capacity up and down as necessary without having to build out to peak requirements. Access to capacity for short periods of time without requiring large capital expense. Reduce the cost of building out large infrastructure for uncertain success and maintaining redundant infrastructures. Transition to role of internal service provider. Gain reporting ability to fairly and accurately allocate costs for shared IT services while offering SLAs.
Virtual farms: Harvesting the potential of cloud computing The basic building blocks of every CaaS solution are called virtual farms infrastructure configurations that you design to meet specific performance, availability, and stringent security needs. Core network infrastructure components such as firewalls and load balancers are automatically bundled into each virtual farm. Additional infrastructure resources are assigned and configured depending on functional needs, including: Network. Choose to configure for publicly facing applications or trusted network space. Servers. Choose virtual or physical servers and operating systems (Windows, Linux). Storage. Option to provision additional storage and back-up. Any number of unique virtual farms can be created, and each can have a different service level either customer managed or Verizon managed. This provides you the flexibility to set up virtual farms for a variety of computing purposes. For example, you can provision a fully managed production virtual farm in which all objects running within the farm are cared for by Verizon, while a second virtual farm may be provisioned as a staging environment with no managed services. CaaS virtual farms: The foundation for your environment Every virtual farm contains: Virtual load balancer Virtual firewall Remote access Defined network space Network connectivity When a virtual farm is created, you have two options for network connectivity: Public IP VPN Customer-facing applications Private IP Back-office applications VIRTUAL FARM TRUSTED NETWORK VIRTUAL LOAD BALANCER SERVER RESOURCES VIRTUAL FIREWALL DMZ NETWORK (PUBLIC IP FACING) STORAGE
IT: Cost center or strategic resource? By moving your infrastructure from a capital to operating expenditure model, CaaS gives you the ability to reduce risk and link spending to the immediate needs of your business versus overspending just in case. Infrastructure control at your fingertips: The CaaS Customer Management Portal A key concern that many organizations have with cloud computing is the lack of direct control over their cloud-based systems. We remedy this problem with the CaaS Customer Management Portal a central hub for all customer provisioning and management activities that offers an easy-to-use, web-based interface with self-service and reporting functionality. The portal offers a high degree of interaction with your CaaS systems, allowing you to: Assign and configure any number of virtual farms. Provision physical servers, virtual servers, storage, back-up, and application support services within each farm. Decommission, modify, and manage on-demand resources as needed. View detailed reporting on the resources deployed, including: Usage reporting for capacity planning and internal charge backs Key server performance statistics Logging of user activity for security purposes Open and view service requests. Through the portal you can quickly create and provision virtual farms according to the individual application, project, division, or business function they will be supporting. For example, by creating a virtual farm to support your finance department, you can track usage and determine accurate computing costs for that department s individual needs, such as quarterly earnings and taxes. The ability to dynamically provision and manage server, storage, and network resources makes it possible to deploy systems in minutes and hours, not days and weeks. This speed helps you to better address spikes in customer demand as they occur instead of spending money on underutilized excess computing capacity that sits idle in your infrastructure. Putting you in the driver s seat With the CaaS Customer Portal, you can create and label your virtual farm according to the application, project, or business function it will be supporting. The portal lets you assign and configure the resources you need: Servers. Choice of operating system and virtual or physical servers Storage. Options to provision additional storage and back-up You can also provision multiple virtual farms and change ports or rule sets as needed.
Try CaaS for yourself It s only natural to have concerns about adopting new technologies. Perhaps the best way to test CaaS is to choose a small, contained deployment opportunity such as a departmentspecific system with predictable high-demand periods HR events such as benefits enrollment and employee surveys or finance events such as end-of-month closing. Why you can trust CaaS Before any cloud computing offering can be entrusted with critical business information, it must demonstrate a high degree of stability and availability. CaaS provides the most important things you need in your infrastructure security, reliability, and control at a level that matches your proprietary IT systems. Security. Security is built into the entire CaaS infrastructure with physical security of the data centers, security of the customer portal, and logical security of the environment including patching, isolation of public and private traffic, secure connections to provisioned resources, and a hardened OS built on a private-build network. Depending on business demands and risk exposure, we offer additional security services such as identity and access management, log management, and security professional services for improved network management and application security. As of June 1, 2009, the Verizon CaaS environment has had its security controls, policies, and procedures examined, measured, and validated against a stringent set of Cybertrust essential practices. Reliability. CaaS has built-in intelligence that enables servers to be deployed quickly in the event of a problem. The only downtime you experience is the time required to reboot the server, which can be done in a matter of minutes. As a result, every CaaS server is by definition a highly available server resource. This high level of reliability is supported by some of the most stringent SLAs available in the industry. Control. CaaS gives you the ability to respond to changing business conditions and maintain control over your infrastructure configuration and capacity. Choose who manages which aspects of your environment and define how your infrastructure comes together to deliver the best possible ratio of IT cost to business performance. We ve brought cloud computing down to earth Verizon s CaaS solution answers the issues that have been holding organizations back from fully exploring the potential of cloud computing as a viable IT solution. CaaS gives you confidence that you can maintain availability of critical systems and manage usage spikes without disrupting your business all while providing a secure environment for your data and infrastructure. CaaS gives you control over the way IT supports the day-to-day needs of your business. You have visibility into your cloud of Verizon Business resources and you retain control over when and how those resources are deployed. Simple and transparent usage-based pricing makes it possible to better align IT costs to corporate budgets and customer demands.
Why Verizon Business? IT experience. We bring more than 15 years of IT outsourcing experience including hosted and managed network, infrastructure, and application services. Network. Our global, IP-based network is one of the largest wholly owned, facilities-based networks in the world, supporting tens of thousands of businesses and government agencies around the globe, including 98 percent of the Fortune 500. Industry-leading service level agreements. We have built an infrastructure that supports SLAs of 100 percent portal and virtual farm availability Leading security practice. We designed and deliver CaaS with security in mind. We offer optional professional security services that include identity and access management, host intrusion detection/prevention, log management, application vulnerability assessments, and network application assessment as well as the security management program. Professional IT services. We can help you assess and migrate your applications to the virtual environment of CaaS, and make sure you are leveraging your existing infrastructure investments. To learn more about our CaaS offering, contact your local Verizon Business sales representative. 2009 Verizon. All Rights Reserved. MC13781 The Verizon and Verizon Business names and logos and all other names, logos, and slogans identifying Verizon s products and services are trademarks and service marks or registered trademarks and service marks of Verizon Trademark Services LLC or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.