Looking to the Future, California's Educators Now Have Clarity on Moving to the Cloud

Verizon Enterprise Solutions' portfolio of cloud computing and data center services is now available to educators across the State of California as part of a recently inked reseller agreement with the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, or CENIC.

By leveraging Verizon's cloud and data center solutions, K–12 schools and public colleges and universities across California will be able to adopt effective and proven technologies to enhance education and research programs, manage applications and data, scale IT resources quickly, efficiently and securely, and boost disaster recovery efforts.

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and respond to the needs of faculty, staff, and students. Founded as a nonprofit corporation in 1997, CENIC designs, implements, and operates the California Research & Education Network (CalREN), a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's educational institutions are connected. Over ten million Californians use CalREN every day.

"We are pleased to have facilitated access to these services for our member institutions," said CENIC President and Chief Executive Officer Louis Fox. "CENIC managed the RFP process, but staff from member institutions participated actively in vendor selection, which means that the vendors who were chosen — Verizon among them — have been judged by California educational institutions themselves as offering the suite of cloud-based services best able to meet their needs."

The following Verizon services will be offered to education organizations across the State of California, as well as other members of CENIC.

• Enterprise Cloud: Computing platform that combines the power and flexibility of infrastructure-as-a-service with the expertise, security and availability that large organizations with mission-critical computing needs require. Verizon offers public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions with a variety of management options and multiple pricing models, including an instance-based option that enables customers to deploy computing capacity on a self-service basis that is billed by the hour.
• Virtualized Disaster Recovery: Fully managed, on-demand service replicates data, applications and operating systems from a production environment into a securely managed cloud-computing environment, where failover to a production-ready environment occurs in the event of a catastrophic outage at a customer's primary facility.
• Data Backup & Restore: Secure, streamlined online-offsite data backup service that is highly scalable and easily customizable. Onsite backup appliance encrypts and deduplicates data before securely transmitting for offsite storage, where it is encrypted for additional security.

Verizon's services are delivered out of company owned and operated data centers strategically located around the U.S. Designed with high levels of security and resiliency, these facilities feature massive connectivity and capacity purpose-built to house mission-critical applications for organizations on a global scale. They also feature integrated security and monitoring capabilities, and are backed by service level agreements for 100 percent power and cooling availability.

For more information on the CENIC-Verizon collaboration, click here.

For more information on CENIC, visit the CENIC website.

Verizon is a leading provider of advanced IT and communications services to governments around the world. Visit the Verizon Public Sector Markets website for more information.