Verizon Communications is officially shutting down its public cloud service, which has already been removed from the company’s website. Customers have been given just two months to move all of their data, or lose it forever. The deadline is April 12.
Verizon’s public cloud was in direct competition with huge public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. With these competitors offering such low costs and huge global infrastructure, Verizon found it difficult to compete in the space. In recent years, HP and Dell have both failed similarly.
And another one bites the dust. Verizon officially shutting down their Public Cloud platform on April 12th. pic.twitter.com/K4a5XQygEq
— Kenn White (@kennwhite) February 11, 2016
So far, Verizon has remained pretty quiet on the topic, which was actually announced to the world on February 11, 2016 via a Tweet posted by a Verizon cloud customer (Data Center Knowledge). The customer posted the entire notice customers received, which announced the April 12 deadline to vacate all data or else it will be “irrecoverably deleted.” (See image on right)
The notice also informed customers that they could use Verizon’s Virtual Private Cloud services, or move to a new cloud service provider. However, the VPC services tend to be more expensive than the public cloud service due to the lack of shared physical servers, which is sure to frustrate some customers impacted by this announcement. VPC services are dedicated, physically isolated cloud environments. VPC and Cloud Storage customers will not be affected by the move, though they may get nervous after this decision to give public cloud customers only a couple months notice.
The company did release a vague statement saying, “As we continue to focus on the enterprise market, we’re discontinuing the niche cloud service that accepted individual credit card swipes on 12 April. We have an enterprise-class range of cloud services including multi-tenant offerings such as cloud storage and virtual private cloud for enterprise and government customers. We’re making significant investments in our cloud platform in 2016.” It has not made any other official public announcement.
Verizon initially launched its public cloud service in late 2013 with high hopes. It faltered about a year ago when it closed the service for a full 48 hours with little notice given to customers. While the technology behind Verizon’s public cloud service was certainly promising, it simply never made it past the vision stage. The services shutting down are Public Cloud and Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces.
