As its business model of the ‘extended enterprise’ offers companies and SMBs ways to address their business needs on a global scale, it also takes into account challenges enhanced by the current economic crisis, such as cutting staff and needing faster time-to-market.

(photo: Kerry Bailey, Senior Vice President Global Services)

“CIO’s have the same needs as before, only they are asking for integrated solutions,” summarized Nancy Gofus, Senior Vice President of global business products. Having acquired Cybertrust a few years back and presently offering integrated security solutions with network solutions, Verizon Business is confident in a future that will bring more and more opportunities for managed services.

Verizon Business is putting more and more emphasis on the importance of relying on an international network and well-managed resources in order to quickly access information. “We can give our customers a combination of managed services and in-house services,” said Kerry Bailey, Vice President of business security solutions. “We are definitely in an era where the network is the computer.” Therefore, information can be managed in various ways. “These resources are already constantly moving back and forth,” added Bailey. “Components are there to bring the extended enterprise to a reality.”

Over 2008, Version developed a new approach towards bringing customers an integrated solution. “There are few companies that can provide such a level of service,” Gofus said. “Having settled channel partnerships with IT software editors and hardware builders, Verizon Business can ensure swift delivery. Our consistency is our value proposition.”

Security, the strongest focus

Chief information officers have seen their jobs toughen as the worldwide economic crisis has spurred a strong focus among IT departments for cost-cutting projects. Verizon Business is closely following these changes, but security remains the strongest focus for the company, along with “everything built around it,” Bailey said. The area of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) is a hot BlogPost for Verizon Business customers. The data is at stake here: spread out across different datacenters, in need of constant control and not belonging to a central environment. “There is no defined perimeter surrounding the data today, and compliance with standards is a never-ending challenge,” Bailey said. “GRC allows companies to gain back control over their data. With the crisis, the focus is now on ‘how do you make it simple?’ and ‘how do you bring down cost?’” According to Bailey, companies are still in a reactive mode, when it is actually time to define their approach.

Using its knowledge of companies’ activities and the strength of its worldwide network, Verizon Business has designed the solution ‘discovery service’ to “watch traffic and start modeling it,” Bailey said. By looking at the origin, the destination, the type and the amount of data transiting through its network, the company can detect abnormalities without looking into the data – secrecy being a fundamental obligation for a carrier. While client activity is the main point of reference for detection of malicious data traffic, Verizon Business also regularly updates a ‘black list’ of risky places on the Internet.