Would you use your telecom company as your Cloud provider?

For folks who are providing computing resources to the rest of the company, virtualization through VMware or Citrix Xen is already a familiar topic.  Virtualizing the computing resources in-house allows you to run multiple virtual servers on a single piece of hardware, which results in cost savings.  However, that means you still have to make capital investments in servers, data center infrastructure and have people to manage them. 

In a climate where CAPEX is hard to come by, public and private clouds can be compelling alternatives.  Some people are concerned that public clouds like Amazon’s may not be secure enough but what do people think about Computing as a Service (CaaS) offerings from large telcos?    See this article on VON about the Verizon offering: http://www.von.com/news/verizon-business-launches-cloud-caas.html. 

What’s interesting for me from this article are some of the value propositions cited:

The portal, which includes extensive reporting capabilities, can also provide management access to any physical servers they may have, and to resources from other providers – a critical differentiator considering that many companies will have physical data center resources in place they may want to retail for various reasons. For example, a business may want to use a virtual environment for staging and development. For business-critical applications, such as database servers, businesses may choose a physical server infrastructure that lets them customize servers as well as select from a range of server configurations.

What’s great there is these are exactly the messages we at newScale send with our newScale FrontOffice Suite for the Virtual Data Center^TM offering.  To be fair, Verizon’s offering looks compelling, hitting many of the same value points.  If you are planning to outsource most if not all of your computing infrastructure, it is worth taking a good look.  However, if you are going to be running a hybrid environment which may include cloud and a couple of in-house virtualization solutions, you may be better off owning a platform neutral solution such as a Service Catalog.  It may provide you better control over the implementation plan and a greater chance of success. 

 

What do you the reader think?

Comments

[WealthNet Partners]

I don't profess to be super knowledgeable on the subject, but the short of it is no, I wouldn't I'm a pretty paranoid security freak with my online stuff, so I'd personally rather the 2 be kept separate.

-Marc