CenturyLink Bows Private Cloud Service

Each private cloud installation runs on the same platform as CenturyLink's public cloud, which includes cloud management, automation and orchestration capabilities, but also combines private elements, ranging from dedicated hardware and physical isolation to enterprise-level security and service-level agreements.

CenturyLink decided to build a private cloud offering after seeing demand in the market for more secure cloud-environments. For example, while many components firms' data infrastructure are not sensitive and better suited for the public cloud, others components should not be shared publically.

"Public cloud is massively scalable, resources are available at any time and the cost point is attractive because you are sharing compute capacity with others. The trade-off however is security. The private cloud makes sense for institutions that have security constraints or regulatory requirements that restrict them from completely abstract compute instances─for example, if they have to show that particular data or applications reside on a physical piece of infrastructure at any given time," says Roji Oommen, managing director of financial services at CenturyLink Technology Solutions.

"The reality is that many of the applications used by Fortune 500 companies are not cloud-friendly. For example, there are regulatory restrictions around how firms consume their IT, so even if they love the scalability of cloud, regulatory restrictions prevent them from using the public cloud. So we took all of our public cloud infrastructure, automation, provisioning and management and created a private replica of that in response to security concerns around the cloud," Oommen adds.

The service will be available in all of CenturyLink's 57 datacenters in 34 cities worldwide, and is federated into the CenturyLink Cloud network of public cloud nodes, which means that users can freely move elements of their data infrastructure between the public and private cloud via a single interface or "orchestration layer". Billing is also managed through a single mechanism, though commercials for the CenturyLink Private Cloud were not available prior to publication.

"Many large enterprises already run hybrid environments: they use internal private clouds for some applications, and public and private clouds of external services provider for others. Our service means that users cannot only choose which applications or components of applications to put in the public and private cloud, but can also rearrange their configuration at any point in time, which more accurately reflects the reality of IT infrastructures at complex financial institutions," Oommen adds.