Verizon says there is more to the cloud than just computing resources

model, or whether it is supplying that model itself.”

Security and compliance. The key concern for its customers today is still around security, but Rosengrave noted that government regulation and compliance can also be a major challenge for organizations. “The number one concern that we’re seeing is around security and it’s more just about a question of the unknown. Customers, they are not sure what security is being built into the cloud and I think a lot of it is coming from things they’ve read or from some of that hype that is in the market place,” he said. “In reality, I think what our customers should be focusing on, and we’ve really tried to indicate to our customers is on the regulatory side of things. This is one of the key challenges that companies are faced with when migrating to the cloud. So assessing where their information is going to reside, what information they can move to different places, and what laws that data will be governed by. That is really why we wanted to offer, not just a managed service of a cloud platform, but also have a range of professional services around that to help customers.”

While the Cloud Computing Program is targeted at customers looking at any type of cloud adoption, including cloud computing platforms offered by other, third party vendors, Verizon Business’ own cloud computing is also part of the offering.

CAAS. The operator is now offering a Computing as a Service platform that allows its customers to subscribe to on-demand processing power from a cloud platform. This service represents a key component of the Cloud Computing Program because it allows customers to try out cloud computing while gaining valuable experience on what it can do for their company.

“We are, especially around the education, very much there to make it easy for customers to try out what the cloud is all about – we have a trial program that we offer companies, that take less than two weeks to set up and there is no ongoing long term commitments to trial an actual, fully working cloud platform, with very little risk to their business,” he said. “The actual cloud computing offering per se, the actual cloud platform – the utility style, dynamic resources — is actually one component in this program, but also in this program, there’re professional services around helping customers assess their cloud requirements, design the