CSC launches BizCloud in the UK

Biz Cloud will lower barriers of entry into the cloud market and appeal to companies concerned about security

CSC has launched an on-premise cloud solution called BizCloud, which it says can be up and running inside an enterprise within 10 weeks.

The service is being launched in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain and will be rolled out to the Nordic countries in September or October.

The infrastructure will be provided by CSC and its partners, set up within a company and provided as a service on a utility basis using a standard rate card.

BizCloud features CSC's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) architecture called Cloud Compute, which is also deployed in the CSC cloud-enabled datacentres.

CSC argues that this means users can adopt a hybrid approach by deploying mission-critical applications on premise with BizCloud, and using CSC's off-premise cloud for disaster recovery or business continuity, or to set up agile development and test environments.

The CloudCompute infrastructure is built on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, which comprises EMC, VMware and Cisco.

The Vblock platforms integrate virtualisation software from VMware; unified networking, security and computing from Cisco; and storage, security and management technologies from EMC.

The infrastructure will also be equipped with a portal created by CSC itself and monitoring technology from CA.

Siki Giuntu, CSC's global vice president of cloud computing and software services, said that the service will provide a level of customisation for particular business processes, apps and unusual storage capacity requirements.

"However, maximum return on investment is achieved via standardisation and we are looking to keep customisation down to between 20 or 30 per cent," she said.

Charges will fall into one of four categories: bronze, silver, gold or platinum, with prices depending on the configuration required. Companies opting for a bronze service will pay £29 per month and customers will be provided with one CPU processor and 1GB of RAM.

A business opting for platinum will be charged £1,000 for which they get eight CPU processors and 32GB of RAM.

The service was launched in the US in February. Giuntu said US users include financial services firms looking for high security and flexible capacity; manufacturing firms looking to keep their capex spend to a minimum and boost agility; and services companies such as telcos who want to accelerate the time it takes to provide their services to the market.

She added that CSC expects its first European customers to come from its existing outsourcing clients.