Demand for secure and reliable cloud computing continues to grow. C-level suites have become the primary drivers of adoption with the realization that the flexibility, economies of scale and time-to market benefits are too appealing to ignore. As a result of the growing demand in the U.S. and Latin America, Verizon Terremark has just completed the deployment of a new node of Enterprise Cloud in our Dallas data center. With this deployment, Dallas becomes the sixth cloud-enabled facility in North America, joining the company’s network of eleven cloud-enabled facilities around the world.  

The deployment of Enterprise Cloud in Dallas was specifically designed to provide improved performance to enterprises with operations in Latin America. As latency is a function of distances and hops across routers, the physical proximity can greatly improve performance as well as serve as a back-up for the Miami data center.

Verizon Terremark’s data center in Dallas features resiliency systems to support a comprehensive suite of IT services including cloud and colocation, among others. As it is a standard for Verizon Terremark, the Dallas facility offers our customers service level agreements for 100 percent availability of power and cooling and integrated features like advanced security and monitoring. Starting now, enterprises and governments can seamlessly integrate existing IT infrastructure with the Enterprise Cloud and leverage the benefits of a hybrid solution- all under one roof in the South-Central region of the U.S.

The Dallas facility is part of Verizon Terremark’s network of more than 50 strategically located data centers around the world. These facilities feature advanced colocation technology, massive connectivity and highly-secured environments purposely designed to house business-critical applications of hundreds of enterprises on a global scale.

New research surfaces on cloud adoption, Verizon Terremark’s Jim Anthony shares new features of the Enterprise Cloud and mobile banking experts gather to discuss security in the mobile age.

Verizon Terremark’s Jim Anthony Reveals the New eCloud

Silicon Angle

May 31, 2013

Verizon Terremark’s VP of Sales Engineering, Jim Anthony, discusses the history of the Enterprise Cloud (eCloud) along with its new capabilities: “The latest update includes IPv6 support, distributed access points that make the environment more reliable, and an improved API that enables developers to make use of every management function built into the primary console. The patch also includes a number of security enhancements.”

Mobile Banking Seen Needing Improved Authentication, ID Verification

American Banker

June 5, 2013

In a panel moderated by Sean Sposito, mobile banking experts gathered to discuss the need of financial institutions to improve security features and protection initiatives around their mobile applications and platforms. Panelists agreed that multi-factor authentication is a must while passwords are no longer a reliable option: “Many users have the same passwords across devices and they’re too simple. Password management is a huge pain,” said Shahid Shoaib, principal consultant, mobility and M2M, Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

Exclusive research: IT commits to cloud computing

ComputerWorld

June 4, 2013

 According to a recent survey conducted by IDG Enterprise, 1,358 technology buyers said that their organizations have or plan to have at least one application or portion of their infrastructure in the cloud. The main driver of this adoption remains to be lowering IT costs while security still tops the list of concerns.

After last year’s busy hurricane season, CIOs and business leaders are more concerned than ever in protecting their mission-critical applications. And 2013 promises to be eventful. Colorado State University predicts four major hurricanes (ranging from categories 3 to 5) and nine in total.

Severe natural disasters have shown organizations’ vulnerabilities and now is the time to prepare for the unforeseen- a challenging but potentially rewarding task. How can you prepare for this hurricane season? Here are five key steps to take today:

Implement an Emergency Plan – You have heard this before. Planning is possibly the most important thing you can do before a disaster. Anticipate all the potential circumstances, and develop and document a crisis plan. This plan should contain disaster recovery and business continuity tactics to help ensure the organization remains operational. Once the plan is in place, take the time to test it. Be sure everyone knows what to do and all the equipment deployed works properly.

Develop a Strong Ecosystem – Today, many businesses rely on their partners to remain functional. Be sure to select partners and vendors whose resources are reliable and available in the event of a crisis. Engage in recurring communication with each and every partner your business depends on and develop ways in which you can help one another.

Protect your Stuff – Vulnerability can be assessed by doing an inventory of critical equipment and applications. It is important to develop a set of best practices and relocate or outsource location of the equipment and systems before it’s too late. 

Rely on the Power of Cloud – The cloud provides offsite infrastructure and services allowing mission critical data and applications to remain functional in extreme weather conditions. Cloud providers have the ability to architect ultra-strong data centers than can remain resistant to the outside. This offers enterprises and governments a high level of reliability and consistency.

Think about the People – Your employees will ultimately implement your plan. It is critical to take the time to train them on new procedures and remind them about old ones. Be sure they can communicate through back up communication equipment and that they have access to the business remotely.

 While natural disasters are inevitable, there is a lot you can do for your business. Taking a proactive approach to protect your infrastructure, your systems and application pays off.   And if you need a trusted partner to help your business get ready for hurricane season, be sure to give us a call at 1 866-507-5004.

Five Steps to a Successful Colocation Kickoff

A common launch point is colocation, which offers several benefits such as managing capital and operational expenses, protecting mission critical data, as well as preparation for managed hosting and cloud computing.

All of this places extra weight on choosing a service provider that you can stick with for several years and one that can support your growth over the long haul. Repeated power failures and system outages can lead to a painful data migration and loss of credibility for your IT department. To help avoid this headache, use this five-point checklist to uncover and understand a provider’s strengths and limitations for a long-term engagement that can support your company’s growth and strategic IT needs.

 DEVELOP A STRATEGIC PLAN WITH THE PROVIDER THAT PROVIDES ROOM FOR GROWTH.

When engaging with a colocation service for the first time, it’s important to think strategically about your own growth and understand the limitations of your future provider. For example, think beyond your initial cabinet. If you’re starting with a cabinet, try to think two or three steps ahead… is the business growing at an alarming rate? Will your initial space satisfy plans for future growth? Make sure there’s room to add space nearby. All too often, organizations are forced to spread cabinets across multiple floors or facilities because their provider filled nearby empty space. Also consider purchasing a large cage in advance so you add cabinets as you need them.

When finalizing your contract, maintain your ‘first right of refusal’ on future space. This allows you to bring in equipment as needed and prevents you from having it spread out across the data center. Get a feel for future space by touring the facilities. Examine the floor layout and ask about plans for future construction. Look for physical security measures and ask about how other customers are arranged in the facility.

Look beyond the initial colocation engagement to determine if the provider has services to support your growth such as managed hosting and cloud computing. And make sure their vision of cloud computing matches yours. The definition of cloud could vary from provider to provider so it’s important to ask each one how they define cloud computing.

MATCH YOUR TOLERANCE FOR RISK WITH THE PROVIDER’S SLAS AND STABILITY.

Every organization’s risk tolerance is different so it’s important that you and your provider agree upon the same level of risks and uptime requirements, as part of your SLA. However, SLAs can sometime differ based on the definition of uptime. You’ll discover the differences when you ask questions about how the provider responds to outages and what’s done to prevent them. To find out more, ask about certain scenarios, such as what happens if they lose power during a storm or what happens when they lose Internet connectivity.

SLAs can also be blended to account for a variety of categories such as an SLA on power, connectivity and response times. Organizations can sometimes mistakenly focus more on the SLA percentage and less on what the number actually covers. Find out exactly what the uptime SLA covers and look for any potential conditional statements around it.

You can also reduce your risks of failures and outages by inspecting the physical security measures of a data center. On your tour, check for the presence of cameras, security guards, controlled access and 24-hour onsite support. But beyond the physical attributes, ask again about procedures and scenarios. If specific IT compliance measures are an issue, ask the provider to show what control measures have been put in place to help meet your requirements.

WHAT VALUE DOES YOUR PROVIDER BRING TO THE TABLE, BEYOND A LOW PRICE?

Costs will invariably be a factor when choosing a provider. But be careful to look beyond the price tag. First, create a set of criteria and then compare costs between capabilities, along with a history of SLAs and outages. Lower prices alone without thoroughly checking into backgrounds can put your company at risk. Look at response times. Evaluate the big picture. Think beyond the price tag.

DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF IT REDUCTION THAT CAN BE ACHIEVED FROM OUTSOURCED SERVICES.

It’s common for SMBs to take advantage of additional services to offset in-house IT needs. Often this means replacing a fulltime headcount with a service that can be contracted through the service provider. The more extensive the service offerings, the less you’ll have to rely on personnel on the ground. The same can be said with aging equipment.

By outsourcing these services, you can control costs in the long run and free your IT staff to focus on other activities that have greater impact on the company. Before signing a contract, check to make sure your provider has the equipment and services that you might one day decide to outsource.

HOW RELIABLE IS YOUR PROVIDER’S INTERNET CONNECTIVITY?

Some data centers unfortunately place all their bets on one Internet provider. If they go, everyone goes. Others, however, leverage diverse routes to the Internet with multiple providers. Ask your provider if they offer a blended type of Internet connectivity with two or more tier-one Internet providers. This helps mantain a fast, reliable route to your destination. If one connection is out or performing slowly, you’re simply moved on to the next best performing service.

To maintain that long-term commitment with your service provider, do as much research as possible long before signing on the dotted line. Your ultimate satisfaction will come from taking a good look at your business and making sure you understand what your business needs to grow. With this in mind, you can leverage the insight to ask tough questions that typically don’t get asked. In the process, you’ll prevent an inconvenient separation and migration to another vendor several years down the road.

As a reader of this blog, you probably follow the cloud and data center industry closely, and are used to reading about industry trends and major developments. You’ve probably seen the phrases “data center security” and “data center efficiency” too many times to count. Yet we rarely get a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes. With this in mind, I thought it would be helpful if I provided a snapshot of a day in the life of a data center manager and shared our key priorities along with some best practices that we follow at our facilities.

I am responsible for the day-to-day operations of some of the Verizon Terremark data centers along the east coast of the United States: Miami, Florida; Culpeper, Virginia; and Beltsville, Maryland. Our team keeps the data centers up and running so that we can effectively serve approximately 1500 enterprises, in 990,000 square feet of raised data center floor space and thousands of servers.

As the facilities’ manager, I ensure that our operations align with four key priorities:

1. Keeping it secure: Our data centers are purposely built to meet the security requirements of enterprises. Physical security measures include security personnel staffed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Security personnel monitor all security cameras, guard building entrance and exit access points, and control key card access to elevators, floors, and roof areas. Our employees, customers, and guests are all processed through our security control centers. Employees must wear visible badges at all times; our customers and visitors must present government-issued identification in order to access the facilities and be verified against approved access control lists. Protecting access is carried through the facilities at all times; no customer cage or cabinet is ever accessed without a proper work driver such as a work order and/or ticket. Our professional security teams perform hourly walk-throughs of the facilities perimeter and colocation floors. Any deviation from standard results in a report sent to the Verizon Terremark senior management team as well as corporate security. This report immediately triggers a response from the lead local managers.
2. Keeping it cool: I start my day at about 6 a.m. with an average of 100 emails in my inbox. Once I’m done reading through them, I proceed to check the alarms. We have extremely sophisticated alarm systems that are placed throughout the buildings to control temperature, humidity, and aisle conditioning. The facilities are staffed by specialized technicians 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the event that an alarm trips overnight, the shift managers assign the task to the staff on-site. Our data centers’ service level agreements (SLAs) are tied to ASHRE Standards and we committed to maintaining the environmental thresholds for our customers. Violating an SLA would impact our financials as well as reputation. We take every precaution to make sure this doesn’t happen.
3. Talking the talk: The bulk of my day is spent in constant communication with the teams that operate the data centers to ensure periodic maintenance procedures are taking place and controls around the buildings are in place. In the event of an incident, I directly engage with the team to facilitate coordination between the customer and/or the different departments within the organization to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
4. Prepare for the worst: Since one of our flagship facilities is located in Miami, we have learned that preparation is the single most important factor in severe weather situations. Solid preparation requires coordination. We must know that there is enough fuel to power the facility, enough chilled water to maintain the temperature inside the building at 72 degrees, as well as enough food and water for all the critical personnel that are to remain in the facilities for the duration of the crisis. For instance, when Superstorm Sandy took place, the facility management team along the East Coast held check-in calls every three hours prior to the storm and hourly calls once the storm hit ground. When the storm began to strike along the coast, the check-in calls allowed us to remain informed about the condition of each data center, while supporting the teams in the facilities in the locations that were most affected. Preparing and remaining in-touch resulted in no data center impact during the storm.

I believe the key to succeed as a data center manager is to make everything your business. Details matter—every customer, employee, alarm, door, pipe, cage, and cabinet: they matter. A detail-oriented approach helps my team and I keep it cool and secure which, in turn, makes the customer our number one priority.

Compliance in the cloud is an interesting, challenging, and recurring discussion for federal agencies. With shrinking budgets and ever-growing application needs, such as big data, agencies are making a faster push to the cloud. Whether this push to the cloud should be internal or external is a key question; and the ability to achieve, demonstrate, and maintain compliance with security requirements is paramount to the discussion.

Compliance in traditional hosting was always based around the concept of hardware completely dedicated to the project, application, and system.  In the cloud, agencies are being asked to share hosts, disks, network, and other infrastructure. Therefore compliance carries even greater importance. In this design paradigm, being able to properly segment and protect data while sharing the physical infrastructure but preventing data spillage, cross-pollination, or direct access is critical to move to the cloud. Cloud providers need to be able to demonstrate that an agency’s data is secure and protected, even while sharing physical resources.

The current working theory that many agencies act on is that operating an internal cloud allows for greater control and therefore allows for meeting higher levels of security compliance, though it’s clear there are no cost savings. When a cloud is operated internally, you still have all of the CAPEX, OPEX, personnel, licensing, space, power, tech refresh, and other costs. It does allow you to gain the “theoretical” control lost when outsourcing to a service provider, but is it truly making a move to the cloud then? Are you really gaining the control you think you are? Generally, the answer to both is no!

Verizon Terremark was the one of the first cloud providers to bring federal customers into the cloud. When one of the main US government public sites made the move to cloud, it moved more than test and development, it moved a highly-visible, public, production presence of the United States government to the cloud. It brought with it production-level needs such as CMS system, large databases, lots of disk IO, high-security needs, etc., and as a result, it also challenged the auditors. It was one of the first instances of a large government production site being moved to the cloud and sharing resources with other federal clients.

The legacy security compliance requirements did address virtualization, but only in the scope of a dedicated system. FISMA, at the time, and to this date DIACAP, do not address the concept of a service provider shared resource such as cloud. The concepts of shared storage network (SAN), or hosts was not addressed at all. In government hosting needs prior to now, every system (whether virtualized or not) was kept completely separate, as that is what the auditors demanded.

So how do you achieve compliance in the current system of FISMA? FISMA has three levels of impact: low, moderate, and high. Beyond the data center controls around physical security and access to infrastructure, there are several logical controls for which to be accounted. Careful logical separation designs are one of the fundamental areas to address, which start with tagging each client’s unique and distinct network segments all the way to the storage. Even though data may be on the same disks, it is now appropriately tagged and logically controlled and available to only the virtual hosts for that client.

Next, is the setup of hypervisors to meet hardened federal requirements. It should be set to prevent guests from talking directly to each other, promiscuous mode should be turned off, and should be protected in separated network segments to guard against a hypervisor jump attack. Those are some of basic first steps at the hypervisor level and down. Depending on the type of cloud service being provided there are many more controls that move into the logical application layer for proper encryption, data access, and validation.

So what is next in federal compliance? FedRAMP attempts to pick up where FISMA and DIACAP left off (and stretch across both civilian and DoD systems). It provides a clear definition of cloud and shared resource models and allows for many new controls and security compliance specifications for service providers.  A notable change in responsibility from the application owners to the IaaS model is encryption at rest. It goes further to dictate air-gapped OSS systems, continuous scanning for compliance and reporting against it, and requires that providers use hardware that is completely dedicated to federal clients only. These controls represent significant challenges in the cloud service provider community. While Verizon Terremark has been doing these things for several years, many providers have built their models on other concepts in cloud, forcing many changes on the cloud provider landscape as a whole.

During the industrial revolution, trains enabled expansion into the western regions of the continent.  Wherever a train station appeared, economic expansion flourished.  Local businesses (saloons, hotels, general stores) blossomed to support the increased flow of people and goods.  Populations grew with the availability of food and work provided by the rail.  Factories arose with a fresh supply of labor and an ability to easily receive raw materials and ship finished goods.  Siting a rail station alone created economic activity, but supported new business growth many times the impact of the rail operation alone (Corrick, J., 1998, “The Industrial Revolution”).

Fast forward to more current times, light rail operations are facilitating similar economic growth.  When a passenger station is positioned, far more than the economic activity associated with the design and construction of the rail station transit hub is realized.  Local businesses flourish such as coffee shops, newsstands, housing developments and all the services associated with an increased residential presence.  Given the economic advantages, tax incentives and other considerations are typically promoted to attract these hubs recognizing that villages appear and prosper growing the respective tax base (Gertler, P., 2009, “Trains and the City”, Forbes Magazine).

Today, industrial-age railway stops are replaced by information-age digital hubs where information is the cargo loaded/unloaded from the transportation system (Nelson, D., 2013, ebay).  Increased economic activity in locations where information hubs (data centers) are commissioned is similarly witnessed.  Spending promoted by the design and construction of data centers alone is substantial, but more impressive is an associated increase in business velocity supporting those data centers.  Massive Internet companies are attracted to the region to better serve a local population hungry for the amenities afforded by the largest public network in history (the transportation system for information).  Trades arise supporting the electrical, mechanical and information technology assets housed within data centers.  Businesses requiring low network latency associated with a proximity to Internet exchanges position themselves close to data centers as do telecommunication carriers.  As is the case for light rail transit hubs, governmental tax incentives and other considerations are considered to encourage the placement of data centers in their respective economic zones to bolster the existing tax base and drive prosperity for everyone.  History has proven it only makes sense.

Over the past few years there has been a lot of commentary about the commoditisation of IT due to the introduction of cloud computing and indeed that cloud itself is becoming a commodity.

A recent article in the Economist magazine focused on the development of a trading platform for cloud computing capacity to create a marketplace between buyers with short-term computing needs and providers with excess capacity for compute capacity.  Similar to what several providers had attempted to do in the telecom capacity market, with limited impact as it turned out.

Now this trading platform may prove to be a successful business model, but it does raise the question as to whether cloud computing is or can be considered to be a commodity in the true economic sense of the word.

In economic terms a commodity has three main characteristics.

1. There are many producers. 
2. It is ‘fungible’ i.e. a consumer can’t really tell the difference between the products produced by different producers, like a litre of gasoline from one supplier is largely the same as another (though individuals may have a brand preference).  On the other hand, cars from two different manufacturers may be in the same category in terms of price and general function, but is sufficiently unique so that a car class cannot be considered a true commodity.
3. The pricing in the market is produced by the interaction of multiple buyers and sellers, hence the evolution of commodity exchanges.

Well, the first one is easy.  There are certainly a large number of providers out there and on the face of it many of them are providing qualitatively similar types of services. 

I will skip the second point for now. On the third point, there is not yet a recognised exchange or trading platform for cloud services with wide adoption (notwithstanding the innovation of the company mentioned in the Economist article).  I recall the CEO of Band-X speaking at a conference explaining why their exchange was less successful than he had hoped.  He indicated that in most interesting commodity markets there needs to be a variation in price over time, crucially both upwards and downwards (see link for article about Band-X from 1997 http://www.economist.com/node/155354 ).  Bandwidth is subject to Moore’s Law and therefore only went one way, downwards.  Cloud is subject to the same forces at least for data processing.

The second point is probably the most interesting.  Just limiting the discussion to IAAS, there are certain service elements which at least superficially sound like they ought to be commodities (e.g. storage, unit of compute, bandwidth).   However, quite apart from the product differentiation of individual underlying components like microprocessors, storage arrays, routers etc., cloud services even in a broad category like IAAS are engineered differently by service providers.

Cloud providers will typically define a unit of compute to facilitate sale of their own compute resources.  However, this does not make it easy to compare to other service providers who have built their infrastructures differently and indeed offer their services commercially in different ways.  For example, Verizon Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud offers both instance-based and resource pool based consumption models to fit different end user needs.  Even for notionally identical quantities of compute and storage, services offered by different companies can vary significantly by a broad range of parameters not limited to uptime, data security, throughput capability, ease of use, customer service, etc.  Therefore, although services from different providers may be similar enough that you could substitute one service for another and achieve broadly the same business outcome, the services themselves offered by different providers are not in general sufficiently similar to be fungible in the true economic sense.

Now, this is actually a good thing.  Life would be very boring if cloud was all Model T only available in black.  There is fortunately a large and vibrant market for different types of cloud models with different performance characteristics serving different needs.  On one hand, end users may be unable readily to compare similar services to the extent that they would like.  However, it does also mean that consumers can select from a wide variety of cloud offerings serving different needs and use cases.

At Verizon Terremark, we build our cloud solutions with the needs of demanding enterprise and Government clients.  That means we build them to be highly secure, highly available and high performing.    We have a good understanding of which workloads work well in our cloud and which ones may fit better in our managed hosting or some combination thereof.

But don’t just take my word for it.  Give it a try.  We will be pleased to assist you.

The term ‘cloud’ in isolation of context has often had its meaning imaginatively exploited either by those with a vested interest in doing so, or through lack of understanding, or both. It appears the buzzword of ‘cloud fatigue’ has now entered into the lexicon!

In the previous post, the intersection of technology drivers was noted as creating transformative new opportunities for businesses. The mobile device has become the primary form factor and information distribution point, and is becoming wearable and embedded (Pervasive Mobility). Then there is an upheaval in social and marketing interaction of connected communities, and the concept of the digital persona which can be marketed and sold to by those willing to exploit algorithms which mine our interactions (Social). Add to this the explosion of data and emerging analytics tools which provide the opportunity to tie relevance and context to user information and data (Information). The public cloud as the fourth pillar, offers the promise of mass scale, elastic delivery of IT resources, consumed on demand. Cloud enables the delivery of information, and allows the other drivers to evolve.

Cloud, and specifically the software that controls it, disintermediates users from the underlying technology. Open Source tools and software frameworks have had a democratizing effect on both consumers and users of technology. Disruption is occurring on both the supply and demand side: the value chain is shifting, and new business models are emerging resulting in value creation, and value destruction.

Using servers as an example, the data centre has already been commoditized. The hyper-scale web providers bypassed leading traditional vendors and in favour of ‘white boxes’ -  low cost, stripped down hardware, often directly sourcing processors, customizable to match their own customer workloads, orchestrated and managed with their own proprietary software. Open Compute plans to take this a stage further by standardizing specifications for ‘vanity free’ hardware based on interchangeable components, with the aim of reducing further cost and waste at the hardware layer and creating a foundation for customers and businesses to build custom and modular servers. Many of those traditional vendors have been hit hard, with value and share shifting to the thriving ODMs.

Open Source technology has also evolved and matured over recent years, and is being increasingly used as a tool to drive disintermediation and alternative business models. If we look at Open Source clouds, storage or networks, for example, we see the development of a “mixed source” ecosystem to maximise product distribution and ecosystem development on the back of the primary ‘for free’ software. Primary contributors hope for related increased commercial activity in adjacent areas, for example, servers, hypervisors, and support services. Other models include dual licencing, open and closed source offerings with full support, or discrete commercial packages available as-a-Service for white label distribution by a Service Provider. What we are seeing is a maturity of business models within and around Open Source, and importantly, increased comfort within the developer community, where the current generation is provided with (and expect) excellent tools, documentation, tutorials and support.

If we extend these concepts further to the latest buzzwords – Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the Software Defined Data Center – further opportunity exists to abstract management and control to storage and network infrastructure layers. Networks have traditionally been overprovisioned and hard to manage from an enterprise and service provider perspective, and there has been no standard way of managing network devices remotely. Extending the principles of server virtualization to network switches, firewalls, devices and potentially higher level services running on virtual machines, offers huge potential benefits of provider automation, cost reduction, economies of scale, as well as greater feature velocity and innovation.

There is complexity, however, and it is still early days, in particular for the enterprise. Today, the major networking vendors provide a complete stack of networking hardware and software, whose products interoperate at the network packet level, but management and provisioning of their devices plus certain services remain proprietary, enabling higher margins and product stickiness. Levels of true sustainable openness, interoperability and programmability – i.e. whether Openflow will truly be adopted as an open industry standard – are theoretically viable, but sceptics point that this is likely to be determined by the tactics of incumbent vendors, either by those looking to protect their installed bases in legacy hardware, or those seeking greater customer lock-in (ergo, the sky-high valuations and acquisitions of SDN start-ups in 2012).

Despite this, there is already thriving and evolving SDN ecosystem at various levels of the SDN ‘stack’ and above, including virtual controllers, switches, routers, and overlay management and orchestration services. Technology democratization has already arrived to networking.

So while this is all very interesting from a macro market and competitive analysis standpoint, how is this all relevant to Enterprise IT? While many enterprises have already reaped cost and efficiency benefits from server virtualization, and some are extending virtualization into private cloud domains (often locked into a management platform), in many cases they have yet to exploit the potential of the public cloud from a mass scale and efficiency perspective to deliver ‘IT as a Service’.

The main ‘issues’ with public cloud infrastructure tend to be specific to a combination of : a) SLA’s for reliable performance in the provider platform; b) availability, predictability and compliance; c) true configurability enabling developer autonomy and self-service; d) price, but not at the expense of a), b) and c).

If we look at provider approaches to delivering infrastructure as a service, they are generally split across two models:

1)      Web-Scale Providers: with massive scale using clustered servers and cheap components, used and designed for their own web businesses. Advantages include developer-friendly tools and aggressive pricing, which is sustained through an almost entirely self-service model. These architectures present significant challenges for enterprises looking to leverage the public cloud into business process design, in terms of predictable performance, availability and security.

2)      Cloud Service Providers (including Verizon Terremark): scale depending on global footprint, with a focus around automation of infrastructure. Advantages: high performance and reliability, embedded security, SLA’s for 100% uptime (Verizon Terremark), managed and unmanaged options. Limitations include configurability of different server hardware, developer tools, and pressures on maintaining the platform at an acceptable cost/price ratio.

A single platform does not yet exist that blends “the best of both worlds” – high availability and performance, hybrid ready and configurable, enabling workload flexibility combined with quality of service selection and SLAs, embedded security and integrated networking, AND Web-Scale cost competitive based on true performance. This is when cloud can truly enable the delivery of information at mass scale, and what enterprises and their users require.  You will be hearing a great deal more about this evolution throughout 2013.

The cloud has proven to be an attractive cost-efficient and flexible model for many organizations. However, some skepticism remains when it comes to the return on investment (ROI) of embracing this technology as evidenced by this Networkworld article a few weeks ago where Senior Editor Ellen Messmer, referenced the results of a study which indicated that one-third of surveyed participants believed that the “costs of moving to the cloud were higher than expected.” Those participants attributed their reasoning to the re-architecting often required when migrating workloads to the cloud. 

As part of the Verizon Terremark team, I have seen this problem first hand, and the apprehension when it comes to the cost and the complexity of moving applications to a cloud environment. Consider an organization that builds a private cloud, which ends up being different from their data center where the networking, the virtualization technology, and the storage infrastructure vary. The cost of modifying workloads, and making them compatible with cloud environments is a non-trivial task. The good news is that organizations looking to adopt the public cloud do not have to go through this cumbersome process.

Verizon Terremark enables the secure transportation of a customer’s existing virtual infrastructure to the cloud completely independent of the provider’s underlying infrastructure—the IP address, storage controllers, network controllers, kernels, etc., remain the same. The enterprise can operate and manage their servers in a public cloud environment just as they would in the data center.

As I perused through the article and the challenges associated with migrating to the cloud – both technical and financial – I couldn’t help but think about today’s cloud offerings and migrating options.

Securely connecting to a public cloud isn’t really a new concept.  In fact, Verizon and Terremark have been offering this for years.  A significant percentage of our enterprise customers take advantage of our private networking functions including Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and (Virtual Private Network) VPN services to connect to our cloud.  Add to that, the dynamic capabilities we offer for creating secure hybrid environments from a customer’s data center to the public cloud, and you have a complete picture of existing technologies and of how enterprises are already securely connecting to the cloud.

Verizon Terremark is dedicated to leveraging its software expertise to address some of the cloud adoption barriers that still exist today. How can we make hybrid models more efficient while keeping costs down? Portability of workloads across data center and cloud environments remains a key requirement for enterprises – they expect to not only seamlessly move workloads between their data center and the cloud but also expect to maintain the same performance characteristics in the cloud. We firmly believe that portability of workloads and delivering predictable performance in the cloud are the keys to greater cloud adoption.

The market is rapidly moving to a point where customers want the cloud to be a true extension of their data center both in terms of being workload agnostic, but also in terms of performance and the ability to leverage their existing data center tools. With our expertise in networks, software development and data center deployments, we are uniquely positioned to deliver enterprise class services to our customers and start their journey to the cloud.