Are you ready for the arrival of CaaS?

Service providers are touting more and more "X as a Service". Businesses are increasingly coming face to face with things like "Software as a Service", "Storage as a Service" or even "Security as a Service". Now, Verizon wants us to consider one more that is in the 'cloud' - Computing as a Service (CaaS). We spoke to Mark Beaumont, Group Manager – Product Management/Development IT Solutions, Verizon business at the launch of the service on the explosion of private and public clouds and how businesses can best prepare themselves on for the service.

 

According to the company, CaaS allows customers to leverage, "to use a Web-based portal to employ computing resources in the quantities and duration dictated by their business needs.  As a result, businesses pay for the resources used and avoid having to build out for peak capacity requirements by buying new equipment and adding staff." Verizon sees this service as ideal for new development projects, major events, mergers and migrations so that organizations can easily and quickly shift IT resources as required.  

 

Beaumont said that Since the launch of this service, they have been receiving robust inquiries from their existing customer base as well as other prospects. "We believe that CaaS offers customers a solution to their business needs, , especially when they are looking to maximise budget and ROI," he said. Beaumont also added that Interest has come from all vertical markets. He added that some sectors are expressing interest in private dedicated cloud environments and are very receptive to the concepts that CaaS offers, which is generally in line with their specific business requirements.

 

 

When asked if CaaS was a private or public cloud solution for customers, Beaumont said that it could be both. "Customers are able to connect CaaS to their Verizon Private IP / MPLS network and benefit from the dedicated High Availability (HA) network context offered by a virtual farm. CaaS offers a form of Private/internal Cloud service at a very competitive rate. Alternatively a customer may elect to have another virtual farm with public access. This would offer unlimited amounts of virtual farms with differing connection methods, bandwidth and selections of customer-managed or Verizon-managed farms," Beaumont explained.

 

According to him, the twofold approach was deliberate. Dedicated private clouds may be the requirement of some large enterprises or Government organizations who need to have dedicated infrastructure and have hundreds of different divisions/departments or potential users, and multitude usage requirements. Vendors offer many ways to support these private clouds, but in general they tend to be more capital intensive to deploy than service-oriented scenarios, which tend to be opex-based. He added that, "It’s a question of choosing the most appropriate solution for the specific user scenario – for example, when companies are looking to consolidate multiple platforms where internal requirements may vary, dedicated private clouds may present significant benefits and cost savings."