Let's start with a pop quiz.
- Have you ever checked in for a flight at an airline kiosk at your local airport?
- Have you ever purchased a movie ticket online?
- Do you plan to make holiday purchases on Cyber Monday?
- Have you ever reserved a car from your local car sharing service on your phone?
- Have you ever filed your taxes electronically?
- Do you track your air miles or loyalty points from your favorite retailer, credit card company or airline online?
- Have you visited the doctor's office or re-filled a prescription recently?
- Have you used the web to renew your annual healthcare benefits?
- Do you use a GPS to travel from point A and point B in your car?
- Have you tracked the shipping status of your packages on your mobile tablet?
If you answered yes, to one or all of the questions above, chances are you've been "on the cloud." Enterprises and large organizations in virtually every sector including government, healthcare, transportation, retail and financial services are increasingly embracing cloud infrastructure amid concerns about performance, control and security.
"We are starting to see a real cultural shift in the willingness to take applications into a public environment," said John Edmunds, vice president of Sales at Verizon Terremark." Consider the airline industry. Whether it's about solving for the logistics and management around passengers, baggage or mail, we see a world where airlines along with many other industries can create a community that includes their customers, suppliers and business partners due to the public places of cloud access that exist within their ecosystem."
According to Verizon's State of the Enterprise Cloud Report, organizations are now using cloud for more than development and testing. They're running external-facing and business critical applications in the cloud – with production applications now accounting for 60 percent of cloud usage.
"As the volume of data increases coupled with demand for more robust analytics, organizations want to take advantage of the agility and flexibility associated with cloud, but need enterprise-grade functionality and performance which has eluded many of today's public cloud offerings," added Edmunds.
Recognizing this, recently Verizon announced the re-architecture of its cloud infrastructure with the launch of Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage for businesses and governments of all sizes. These services will be available in public paid beta beginning in the fourth quarter this year.
"We've spent the last two years examining all of the traditional rules and assumptions which have been associated with cloud and have challenged them in order to address a specific market need for a wide range of industries. With Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage we are enabling enterprise-class workloads to perform reliably and securely while providing the flexibility and economic benefits of a general public cloud," Edmunds continued.
Edmunds cautions against a "t-shirt sizing" approach when it comes to deploying applications in the cloud.
"There is no one size fits all. Every workload is specific to the environment in which it is deployed and there are relevant risk and security compliance requirements that characterize several industries whether it's HIPAA, PCI DSS or FISMA which are akin to the healthcare, financial services/retail and government sectors respectively," said Edmunds.
Enterprises with immediate needs can use Verizon Enterprise Cloud today if they're not already on the platform. Verizon Enterprise Cloud (ecloud) is well suited for the hosting of websites that experience heavy or seasonal demand. It can also combine traditional environments – physical and virtual – with private cloud services hosted on premise.
In addition to meeting the needs of traditional IT departments across all organizations, Verizon's ecloud offers leaders within lines of business including marketing, product development and finance the speed-to-market and flexibility they need to respond to new opportunities in order to better compete and outpace their competitors.
For more information on Verizon's cloud services click here.
