Cloud Services

In 2012, CENIC staff, with participation of staff from several member institutions, wrote and issued an RFP for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). After a lengthy and careful examination of the responding bids, the committee recommended that CENIC pursue contracts with three vendors.

As a major advantage for CENIC members’ convenience, CENIC’s own RFP process in selection of the following three vendors' services will serve in place of all institutional local procurement processes.

(Additional providers with whom CENIC has developed contracts outside of an RFP process include Amazon Web Services and AT&T Cloud.)

Questions about any of these services can be directed to info@cenic.org.

FireHost

is the industry’s leading secure cloud provider. It reduces risk for customers by protecting critical data and helping them exceed compliance requirements. It is the only cloud provider with an infrastructure that was built secure from the ground up, alleviating customers from bolt-on or do-it-yourself security and compliance responsibilities. FireHost’s secure cloud is backed by a team of security specialists, including the industry’s only combination of a chief security officer, chief information security officer, and security operations team. The differentiation of its secure cloud offering is based on the following:

• Multilayered Security: The most extensive layers of built-in protection of any cloud provider, including IP reputation filtering, DDOS prevention, web application firewalling, IDS/IPS, encryption, etc.
• Performance & Security: FireHost’s creative architecture avoids traditional performance-security tradeoffs and utilizes security to actually enhance infrastructure performance.
• Secure Cloud Infrastructure: Compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and security orchestrated as a high-performing, secure cloud
• Fully managed: Full-time security operations and support teams share your security and compliance burden, handle integration, infrastructure management

For more information on FireHost, please contact Morgan McGowan at morgan.mcgowan@firehost.com.

CenturyLink Cloud is a suite of cloud services which includes use of:

• Virtual Servers that are customizable and burst-friendly,
• Cloud Blueprint executable templates to enable the rapid implementation of a cloud solution,
• Network Services that allow the provisioning of VLANs and VPNs, firewalls, and burst-friendly billing, and
• Application Services in a multi-tenant service data center environment.

CenturyLink provides the infrastructure — including space and power, compute resources, storage resources, virtualization operating system, networking resources — and use of the Control Portal and API for provisioning and management.

For more information about CenturyLink Cloud, please contact Frank Saraceno at Frank.Saraceno@CenturyLink.com.

Education organizations throughout the State of California can now benefit from Verizon’s enterprise-class cloud computing and data center solutions. CENIC members can now purchase the following Verizon services:

• Enterprise Cloud: A managed computing platform that combines the power and flexibility of infrastructure-as-a-Service with the expertise, security and availability that large and small organizations alike with mission-critical computing needs require.
• Virtualized Disaster Recovery: Enables customers to replicate data, applications and operating systems from their production environment into a securely managed cloud computing environment.
• Data Backup & Restore: Provides secure, streamlined online-offsite data backup and restore that is highly scalable and easily customizable.

Visit the Verizon Public Sector website for more information, and contact Cleve Nash at Verizon for more information.