Security driving cloud conversations as Verizon bolsters ANZ capabilities

Verizon will leverage its local cloud capabilities and a growing portfolio of on-network security services to meet growing cloud demand across key Asia-Pacific geographies, the company's local head has said as the company took the wraps off of the Australian instance of its Verizon Cloud platform this week.

To be hosted from Verizon's data centre in Melbourne, the new environment will pit the company against companies like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, which have been progressively filling out their local cloud offerings in response to rapidly growing customer demand in the region.

“Top of mind” demand for security services had made Verizon's on-network offering particularly competitive, ANZ managing director David Kim told CSO Australia, singling out Verizon's global network as a key feather in the company's cloud offering.

“The advantage of running a global network is that you've got 85 to 87 percent of the traffic on that network at any point in time,” he said. “This allows us to see the behaviour of the traffic that traverses that network. Providing that visibility adds tremendous value in the security space.”

That value has increased recently as the growing flood of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks puts organisations of all sizes on the back foot; Verizon, like many other service providers and network operators, is increasingly helping organisations block DDoS attacks by detecting and remediating them far away from the corporate network.

Having so many security and other services operating on the same network has allowed Verizon to consolidate them into a single console, providing a 'one pane of glass' view of the customer's network.

With cloud adoption now a sure thing at nearly every level of business and government, the conversations Verizon is having with clients have shifted enough that they are no longer about whether or not to go with cloud; rather, Kim said, organisations want to know about specific services that will support their move into the cloud.

These include areas such as identity as a service, unified communication as a service, and managed security services – all of which become increasingly important as the type and volume of data stored in cloud services grows with demand.

Local availability of Verizon Cloud capabilities will give ANZ companies access to services like Secure Cloud Interconnect – which securely links Verizon's cloud environment with clouds run by Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and HP – as well as the Verizon Cloud Marketplace offering cloud resources that are certified to operate in the Verizon cloud.

Such tools will help boost clients' efforts around both security and compliance, Kim said. “There is still quite a bit of sensitivity around data sovereignty,” he explained. “What really has changed is the maturity around using the cloud as a deployment mechanism.”

“Customers are coming to providers like Verizon to ask 'how secure is it?',” he continued. “They're asking whether we provide managed security, and how secure we are in erms of ensuring that they can go through a full audit and tick the boxes both internally and externally.”

Cloud-based application provider Panviva has been named as an early adopter of the Verizon Cloud, using it to deliver its SupportPoint software-as-a-service tool to more than 200,000 users in 37 countries.

Verizon operates nearly 50 data centres globally, including 13 top-tier network access point facilities. Within Australia, it runs data centres in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra.

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.