Some enterprise customers just aren’t comfortable throwing their data into a public cloud environment, says Ellen Rubin, vice president of cloud products for Terremark, which is owned by Verizon.
So, the company announced today a suite of new off-premise private cloud offerings for enterprise customers. Private clouds allow enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud — virtualization, scalability, and not needing on-premise hardware — while also having dedicated infrastructure that is not shared with other users.
“What we’ve been hearing over the past couple of years from customers has been that they really like our enterprise cloud, the support, the SLAs [service level agreements], but that they really need a single-tenant version of that offering,” Rubin says.
The move highlights and ongoing concern that some have about public cloud deployments, in which hardware infrastructure is shared between multiple customers. Some of the concern could be more than just unease related to sharing infrastructure, though, says Melanie Posey, an IDC researcher, and it could be for compliance reasons. Auditors in some cases, she says, prefer to see sensitive information stored on dedicated infrastructure in a cloud environment. Other times, she says, there is a less tangible concern by customers, and they just simply feel more comfortable using dedicated hardware in the cloud.
“Not everyone is at the same level of cloud acceptance, enthusiasm and comfort, so the service providers have to have a product line that reflects that spectrum of where customers are related to their readiness to embrace the cloud,” she says.
Introducing an off-premise private cloud offering is not all that different from what Terremark has been doing, Rubin acknowledges. The company’s roots are in colocation, managed hosting and, increasingly in the past few years, public cloud computing. The company has worked in the past with certain customers who requested an off-premise private cloud setup on customized build-outs. But, today’s announcement standardizes that offering for customers.
The Enterprise Cloud Private Edition, as the company calls it, will be a compute and storage IaaS offerings that is priced slightly higher than Terremark’s equivalent public cloud. With the extra cost, customers are guaranteed dedicated infrastructure. Private clouds are priced based on the memory of the compute power used by the customer, with a minimum requirement of 500GB, with pricing reductions at 1,000GB and 2,000GB of memory. Rubin says if customers still aren’t comfortable with an off-premise private cloud, the company works with individual customers to establish on-premise private clouds.
Terremark will also use the company’s CloudSwitch technology to help customers integrate between on-premise IT infrastructure and the off-premise Terremark private cloud. Verizon bought CloudSwitch, which is software that bridges two environments in an encrypted format, which allows for easier migration to a cloud setup.
Terremark — which Verizon bought last year for $1.4 billion — is not the only company to have focused an announcement on private cloud deployments. Latisys, another infrastructure provider, made a similar announcement in March.
