Verizon Secure Cloud Grows and Gets Into Public Life

The cloud’s the thing, folks. Everyone knows it and anyone who can is trying to get a piece. Verizon this week took a much bigger bite for itself.

The company has launched a secure, high-performance environment for cloud computing, dubbed Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI), built on Verizon’s Private IP network with any-to-any connectivity of IP.

The SCI service is already growing globally by expanding into Latin America while adding scope in Europe and the U.S, the company said in an announcement this week. The new markets include Sao Paulo, Frankfurt and Russelsheim, Germany; and New York and Los Angeles.

The Secure Cloud Interconnect service is an SDN designed to work with enterprise customers to connect, manage and secure cloud environments across global cloud and data center networks. The service now includes connections to six cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google, HP, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce and Verizon, and three data center providers: Equinix, CoreSite and Verizon. In total now, there are more than 30 global locations in the Americas, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. That’s not all, either. The brand intends to keep growing the network with future expansion plans in the Asia-Pacific region slated to be completed this fall.

The company is not just after commercial clients. It is targeting public sector business by making SCI available to municipal and government agencies with all the security, reliability, performance, simplicity and efficiency needed to support mission-critical workloads and applications.

“Public sector organizations across the U.S. rely on Verizon for secure and reliable networking,” said Mike Maiorana, SVP, public sector markets, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Our Secure Cloud Interconnect service builds on Verizon's strengths and addresses many of the barriers impacting public sector cloud adoption, including security, scalability, flexibility and control. Secure Cloud Interconnect delivers the connectivity our public sector clients require to support workload and application deployments across multiple cloud and data center providers.”

To deliver enterprise-class performance and security, Verizon is deploying edge routers into third-party data centers to enable pre-integration of networking and interfaces.

For federal agencies, SCI offers connections to the FedRAMPSM-certified cloud platforms delivered by Verizon and Microsoft. State and Local, Education and Public Safety departments also are now able to tap into SCI’s full complement of cloud and data center providers.