CSC Lays Out Cloud Roadmap

CSC unveiled a commitment to the cloud on Monday, detailing its strategy and roadmap to provide and help companies manage a wide range of public and private cloud services. The company, formerly known as Computer Sciences Corp., plans to roll out a bevy of enterprise cloud services and additional managed services over the next year.

CSC, with more than 91,000 employees, 43 data centers and more than $16 billion in annual revenue, is one of the larger providers of managed and outsourcing services to enterprise IT departments. It is expanding its product and services portfolio with a range of new offerings that build on its heritage of managed services, which it is now describing as "private clouds," to take advantage of the hype and interest surrounding cloud services.

"We are trying to tell the market that we are going to embrace cloud computing and help lead the way in a very unique market opportunity," said Brian Boruff, vice president of CSC's Cloud Computing initiative. Boruff said the difference between cloud services and managed services is that cloud offerings generally as "pay as you go" and can easily scale up and down as needed. They are generally cheaper than managed services, are provisioned and set up over the Web and "usually have a two to three page agreement rather than a 20-page outsourcing contract," he said.

CSC will be offering Cloud Orchestration Services to help customers set up and manage cloud services by providing monitoring and management service levels, remote monitoring, reporting, auditing and data transparency. CSC said it will automate the provision of arranging, coordinating, federating, managing, securing and operation of private, public and hybrid cloud computing environments. It also will roll out a line of Trusted Cloud Services to supply desktops, computing, storage and network infrastructure services. The company also is building up its cloud consulting capabilities and plans to offer cloud services through its consulting practice.

"For example, we have a 1,400-person security solutions team and have 10 managed security services. We plan to bring that into this cloud model, although many of those should continue to be run in a managed environment," Boruff said.

Some companies are willing to take more risks in order to reduce costs, and making use of public cloud services are a way to help them do that, he said. The key, he said, is to provide the right mix and to be able to integrate the public and private cloud services in such a way that customers can maintain the right level of security and service levels.

"One of the services we are offering is where we come in for a week or two and do an ROI assessment, looking at what a potential customers is spending on storage and computing," Boruff said. "We will develop an architecture and roadmap to see whether it makes sense to move some things into the cloud. For companies with a lot of unstructured data that isn't mission critical, it may make sense for them to move some of that to a public cloud. But if they have a lot of data that is crucial to the company or that is covered by regulatory and compliance laws, it probably makes sense to keep that in a private cloud. We think that many companies will end up with a public-private hybrid set up."

The company's roadmap includes offerings like cloud computing, storage, hosting and PC backup, as well as managed services like security, identity management, backup and support, and help desk under the Orchestration Services banner. CSC said it will provide more details on its Cloud Services this fall.

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