Infrastructure as a Service, in Action

A West Chester, PA-based company was searching for IT help, to more effectively and securely distribute confidential and proprietary content to its customers. Enter Verizon Business, with its managed cloud service offering.

Modevity, LLC will use Verizon Computing as a Service (CaaS), an on-demand, flexible solution that allows businesses to harness cloud computing to better manage IT resources and deliver performance and security that supports their growth.

Better Alignment of Financial and Human Capital
In addition to these benefits, Modevity expects to see a significant positive impact on the company's bottom line as a result of embracing this managed cloud service offering.

"We are focused on continuing to grow Modevity in a smart way by making key resource decisions in terms of capital and staffing expenditures," said Tom J. Canova, co-founder and chief marketing officer for Modevity.

"Moving to a virtual environment with Verizon Business allows us to consolidate our existing server hardware and software, and eliminates future purchasing and licensing costs in that area. It also allows us to add more staff in key areas -- all while maintaining consistent, reliable service to our customers."

Complete IaaS Platform Solution
Verizon Business is providing Modevity with a comprehensive cloud-computing environment, supplying server hardware, bandwidth, load balancing, firewall network security, backup and managed services to support the Modevity ARALOC Content Rights Management hosted solution.

Modevity can now rely on Verizon's out-tasked secure and available Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. This frees up Modevity to invest in more strategic product development, research and development, and customer support initiatives.

"With Verizon Business as its partner, Modevity can grow its business strategically while relying on us to seamlessly power its customer applications," said James Geary, vice president of Verizon Business SMB sales. "Our world-class CaaS solution will allow Modevity to drive more value from its computing resources while controlling costs."

A key consideration in the selection of Verizon Business was its flexible delivery model and the ability to pay only for resources consumed. As a SaaS (software as a service) provider for content rights management product solutions, Modevity was keen to work with a partner that had a similar approach, as well as provided the flexibility to grow the infrastructure as its user base and global footprint grew.

According to Canova, "To continue to be successful, we have to keep our customer's software fully functional and reliable 24 x 7. Verizon Business understands this, and in fact, Verizon Business delivers CaaS with the exact same approach we use for our customers. We are confident that in Verizon Business we have selected a cloud-computing leader, and that Verizon Business will serve as a true seamless extension of the Modevity team."

Public, Hosted, and Internal Clouds Defined

Like any new business technology, the early development of cloud services can be a little confusing -- as some descriptions are still open to interpretation. However, the dialog is helpful, because it enables us to focus on the true business value of data center resources.

According to Forrester Research, cloud computing platforms are more than shared multi-tenant infrastructures on the public Internet. There are three infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud deployment options available; each has unique characteristics and economics.

Forrester’s three cloud service scenarios follow:

Which cloud service scenario is a best-fit for your business needs? Well, that depends upon a number of related factors -- such as your organizational bias for direct control, sensitivity to risk, and overall usage requirements for a cloud computing platform.

Public Cloud Scenario
Public clouds are easily accessible, multi-tenant virtualized infrastructures that are managed via a self-service portal. They deliver superior economies of scale to customers, as the infrastructure costs are spread among all users, giving each individual client an attractive low-cost, pay-per-use model.

They are managed and supported by the cloud provider and are typically homogeneous, meaning all customers share the same pool of infrastructure with limited configuration, security protections, and availability variances.

Internal Cloud Scenario
Internal clouds have similar characteristics of a public cloud, but hosted within your own data center. They leverage more of your standard processes and protections, but tend to be limited in size and scale. Your IT organization must incur the full capital and operational costs for the physical resources.

They are best for applications where you want complete control and configurability of the infrastructure and security. This most often applies to applications that manage sensitive information that is subject to strict compliance standards.

Hosted Cloud Scenario
Hosted clouds are hybrids -- a multi-tenant cloud atop rented resources, but dedicated to a single client. They help you avoid the capital and operational expense of an internal cloud, growing and shrinking the size of the cloud as needed by simply renting more resources (often added via a pay-per-use model) but providing more custom SLAs.

They give you more flexibility, where you can adjust the security as needed, specify the infrastructure elements to be used, the SLA to be applied, and set other constraints not available on a shared public cloud.

Plus, the cloud is managed by a Service Provider -- rather than your IT team. However, the economics of hosted clouds are more like managed hosting than public clouds -- since the servers that make up the cloud are typically fully dedicated to you.

Evolutionary Pathway to Cloud Services
Forrester concludes that cloud services are infrastructure deployment options that help businesses better match the needs of the application with computing resources. It’s the integration between these infrastructures that delivers the greatest value.

The goal is to speed IT service delivery, while reducing costs. Therefore, consider all options. Ask your service provider to explain their offerings, and if they can provide a pathway to virtual private cloud services -- between your data center and their cloud infrastructure.