VMworld 2012: NEC's Cloud in Vault

Today many companies are looking into the different cloud computing offerings provided by different vendors. Most of those vendors provide off-site services where the business has little of no control over the servers or the data. Trusting security, data integrity and performance levels to the cloud vendor. At this past VMworld 2012 I met with NEC’s Bill Michael, Director Cloud Services to discuss NEC’s new Cloud in a Vault service. NEC’s Cloud in a Vault takes a completely different tack on cloud computing operation by offering a private cloud operation that’s built entirely according to the customer’s requirements.

NEC’s Cloud in a Vault is oriented toward enterprise customers like health care and financial institutions where scalability, security and compliance are of critical importance. Unlike other cloud appliances that are emerging, NEC’s Cloud in a Vault is not a prepackaged appliance. Instead, it is custom built according to the needs to the customer and the customer doesn’t need to pay out an upfront purchase price. Instead, they pay a monthly rental cost that varies according to the compute power, storage, networking, services and levels of compliance that they require.

NEC’s Cloud in a Vault can be deployed either in one of NEC’s datacenters or it can be deployed on-premise. If the customer first decides to deploy at an NEC site they can later retract the deployment and move it to one of their own locations. Another unique feature is the fact that NEC uses Traveller's Insurance to actually insure the levels of SLA that are required. If there is an outage then Traveller’s Insurance will pay the business the actual costs of the outage. That’s very different for other cloud providers that might give you some discount on the cost of their service if there is some interruption of service.