Verizon Business has launched a cloud-based storage service but will not offer an Australia-based location to host data until at least early 2011.
The service, Verizon Cloud Storage, will initially offer enterprises and high-end SMBs a choice of five locations to store their data: three in North America, one in Germany and one in Japan.
Two further storage locations in North America will be announced in the third quarter of this year, and in additional European locations by the end of 2010. Details on further APAC expansion are due later in the year.
According to Verizon Business Principle Consultant, Ray McQuillan, the service will offer customers a high degree of control over their data.
“Customers will have 100 per cent control over the location of their data, and can select a single node or choose to propagate across as many nodes as their business demands,” McQuillan said.
“[The service] will offer customers various methods of accessing their data, giving them control to move data in or out of the platform as required. [It] will allow customers to retrieve 100 per cent of their data at any time.”
Enterprises and larger SMBs were likely to utilise the service for a wide range of needs, such as a means to move data needed for compliance requirements off primary storage and out into the cloud, McQuillan said.
Tier two data — reference data, low-transactional and unstructured data, and tier three data — that which was rarely accessed, unstructured non-transactional, would also be a likely candidate.
The new storage offering will also feature a range of consulting services, Verizon Data Retention Services, aimed at allowing organisations to perform data discovery and retention policy assessments then move toward developing formal data storage and backup strategies and a storage-based strategic roadmap.
The lack of a local site for data storage would not affect the take up of the service by local organisations, McQuillan said
“Verizon has always worked with its customers, with state and federal governments, as well as compliance agencies to ensure all regulatory requirements are met,” he said.
In April, Amazon acknowledged that it would face some difficulty in attracting the public sector and some private sector customers to its suite of Web Services until it launched an Australia-based data centre.
Head of Amazon Web Services and senior vice president, Andy Jassy, said at the time that while the company’s then newly launched Singapore data centre would likely appeal to Australian SMEs, attracting government and financial sector customers could be a challenge.
“There is no doubt that there will be some customers who will not use our Web Services until we have a data centre presence in Australia and those customers will wait before they leverage our services,” he said.
“Some of the organisations which might not leverage the Asia Pacific region data centre are those with regulatory requirements that require the data to be in country … the government-, pharmaceuticals- or insurance-side.”