Verizon debuts NaaS cloud management for unified multicloud

Verizon’s newest addition to its network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering is Cloud Management, a new feature that lets users manage applications and networking architecture across multicloud and hybrid layouts.

Cloud Management, which the company announced this week, allows businesses to manage public, private and hybrid clouds – along with their respective compatibility, data sovereignty and accessibility concerns – through a single portal, providing across-the-board visibility into disparate parts of complex infrastructure.

The idea, according to Verizon Business chief product officer Debika Bhattacharya, is to make the process of managing and monitoring multicloud environments and their associated apps simpler and more user-friendly. “Being able to deploy workload connections quickly between different environments empowers organizations to scale cloud engineering and development processes, mitigate risk, and operate with minimal friction,” Bhattacharya said in a statement.

The product is essentially a mashup of offerings already on the market, according to EMA vice president of research Shamus McGillicuddy, blending multicloud networking functionality and cloud interconnect as a service.

“You’ve got these companies that are good at software-defined cloud interconnects where they’re helping you build connectivity between clouds and data centers in a software-defined way, as opposed to using individual direct connections that you buy from, say, AWS,” he said. “But they’re also offering you management and observability across all your clouds.”

It’s an important simplification, McGillicuddy said, given the march of multicloud. He cited EMA’s research as saying that substantial majorities of not just large enterprises, but SMBs and the mid-market as well, are likely to have multiple cloud instances from different vendors.

The product is likely to appeal particularly to existing Verizon customers, according to IDC research vice president Ghassan Abdo.

“Part of the reason we’re starting to see software companies … provide a platform that allows you to connect to different cloud environments in a more sustainable policy management way,” he said. “The idea is to rationalize that connectivity and create a uniform approach to it.”

Not all companies using cloud from different vendors will necessarily need the multicloud networking piece of the offering, of course. Plenty of businesses locate different applications in different clouds without the need for those apps to talk to one another or share data. But for those that do, Verizon’s newest offering could allow them to address a number of potential networking blind spots.

NaaS Cloud Management is available now in more than 100 countries. Verizon said that the product can be purchased on a consumption-based or fixed-port basis, depending on the customer’s needs.