Verizon Launches Cloud Interoperability Service

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Verizon has added cloud services interoperability to its range of enterprise offerings. The company says that the move will eventually allow complex organizations to have a full hybrid cloud environment. The new cloud service provides enterprises and government agencies the ability to manage a multi-cloud environment, including dynamic bandwidth allocation, application performance throughput, quality of service, and usage-based billing.

Enterprise organizations will be able to use Verizon’s Private IP service to connect to multiple cloud services, through what they call Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI). So far Microsoft Azure is fully connected and other major cloud services providers are expected to be online at various intervals throughout the year. The company expects all major cloud services providers to be interoperable by the end of the year.

In addition, enterprises that rely on Equinix colocation for their private cloud can use Private IP in 15 Equinix sites in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific; (Northern Virginia., Newark, N.J., Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Silicon Valley; London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris; Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore).

“This effort builds on the Equinix colocation work we launched last year, and we have plans to continue building the toolset for our enterprise customers in the future,” Thierry Sender, Director Product Development, Verizon tells CivSource. “Our goal is to remove the barriers to cloud adoption and give customers the option to use our other tools even if they have a variety of vendor relationships and services.”

Those tools include Verizon’s managed security services and a total system view offered through the SCI service. With SCI, enterprises gain full visibility into which applications are being consumed, by whom, and where and how they are performing. Verizon is deploying Private IP edge routers into third-party clouds to enable pre-integration of networking and data center interfaces. After an enterprise selects its cloud partners, location and service information, Verizon will automatically provision the connection in minutes or hours, versus days or weeks or a month when using the traditional model.

SCI with Verizon cloud will be immediately available in three locations (Denver, Northern Virginia and Santa Clara, Calif.), with sites in Europe (London, Amsterdam) available in May. Additional sites are planned for Europe and the Asia-Pacific region by year’s end. Verizon will offer connections up to 10 gigabits to clouds (Verizon, Equinix, Microsoft) connecting to SCI.