Verizon taking customers directly to the IBM Cloud

Verizon is now offering its customers a direct connection to the IBM Cloud. With Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect services users can connect directly to IBM Cloud services through a secure, flexible private link that enables workloads to move between clouds.

It also gives enterprises the freedom to store data in a variety of settings, including a traditional IT environment, a dedicated on- or-off premises cloud and a shared off-premises cloud making it easier to scale and meet business requirements, according to the company.

Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect enables users to take advantage of Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities that include consumption-based bandwidth, pre-provisioned on-demand resources, controlled application performance and varying classes of service.

Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect customers can now connect to IBM Cloud data center sites located in Dallas and San Jose in the U.S. and Tokyo and Sydney in the Asia Pacific region.  Two additional sites are planned in Europe for the beginning of 2016.

With IBM, Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect now offers access to eight cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google CloudPlatform, HPE Rapid Connect, Microsoft ExpressRoute for Office 365, Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, Microsoft Azure Government and Verizon ) and three data center providers (Coresite, Equinix, and Verizon) at more than 50 global locations in the Americas, Latin America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect supports IBM’s broader portfolio of Direct Link services, which allow customers to establish a high-speed network connection between their existing IT infrastructure and the cloud compute resources on the IBM Cloud powered by SoftLayer. The services come in three distinct offerings—Cloud Exchange, Network Service Provider (NSP), and Colocation.