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

right cloud platform for their organization, helping them migrate to that cloud program, and then finally, the actual management. The interesting thing in here is it doesn’t have to just be our own managed cloud offering, so we can also use this program to assist customers whether they are looking at alternates to our utility platform, or whether they are looking for us to help them build a dedicated cloud platform as well. Some organizations would still like to have an independent like ourselves to look at the security whilst they are moving to another vendor’s cloud platform.”

Globally, Verizon Business’s Computing as a Service (CaaS) platform is currently supported by infrastructure in the US and Europe, but Rosengrave revealed that an Asia Pacific facility is currently being constructed and will come online next year. “At the moment, we are having customers utilizing, from Asia Pac, our Computing-as-a-Service and that infrastructure is located in the US or Netherlands. We are currently rolling out infrastructure that will be physically located in Asia Pac, which will be located in Hong Kong. That will be ready for launch in August 2010,” he said.

Users. So who is using cloud computing today? “There are a couple of trends we are picking up there. One is for application development and testing. We are getting a lot of organizations looking to use cloud computing for that right now. We are getting some of the large customers as well that are very happy to jump on board CaaS because it is so easy to get on board, really just to test it, so they can then report back to the board and say, ‘yes, we know about cloud computing, we’ve been testing it, and these are the pros and cons. The third area is from organizations that are looking to grow – whether it is into a new market and they don’t want to invest in new infrastructure and resources, or it is within existing markets with a new application or product. Imaging if a customer is launching a new online retail brand – that is a perfect platform to do that on because they don’t have to invest heavily on infrastructure and resources with capex to start off with, and they are not going to be caught out in terms of capacity planning and under-provisioning for services,” he said.

At the end of the day, cloud computing is here to stay, Rosengrave said. “I’ve not yet seen an organization that would not have some services that could be moved to the cloud. But also, I don’t think I’ve seen an organization where at this stage, you would move absolutely everything to the cloud. It is very much around degrees, individual services in those organizations that can be moved to the cloud. There are applications and services that mapped very well to the key benefits of clouds, such as capacity on demand. A classic example would be applications development and testing — it makes a lot of sense for a lot of organizations to move those services into the cloud.

“And then there are organizations that have applications that are very peaky and troughy in terms of usage, so whether it’s a retail organization that has particular seasons, or finance organizations that have busy seasons that have additional capacity requirements around the financial year. We really look at those types of services to start with,” he said.

In this way, there is no absolute formula to cloud computing. Companies need to evaluate what their objectives are and then chose the most appropriate path towards adoption. Some will chose to migrate slowly. Others might wait. But it is not something that they can ignore.

“I think it’s one of the most significant developments in terms of the alternative procurement methods that are available to companies for IT service and service delivery. I think, with that, one of the big challenges for companies is how to take advantage of that, and some organizations will potentially have to adapt their own internal structure to be able to make the most of it, and I think that is where we are going to see some of the true transformational aspects of cloud computing. For instance, having IT teams more focus on capacity planning and analyzing IT capacity, rather than actual provisioning, etc. I think the services are there, organizations need to be educated on how best to use them,” he said.