This is a guest post written and attributed by Bryson Koehler, EVP/CIO of The Weather Company, a Verizon Cloud beta customer.
For more than 30 years, The Weather Company has brought real-time weather information to millions of households and organizations across the globe. Being a 24-hour, 365-days a year operation is no easy task – we require technology that allows for rapid delivery of content, high performance, through reliable and secure networks at reasonable costs.
As times changed, our technology needed to evolve as well. Our business model is shifting from one focused on our television network to one that delivers weather-related content and data to a variety of audiences across many different platforms, including not only The Weather Channel on TV, but also weather.com and wunderground.com online and The Weather Channel apps on mobile, tablet, desktop and more.
Doing this requires highly available, reliable and scalable technology services. We ingest, catalog and distribute Terabytes of content daily. Weather is one of the largest, most volatile datasets in the world, and The Weather Company is a leader in translating big data into meaningful information that helps both consumers plan their daily activities and advertisers relay the most relevant message. Because of this, we are a perfect fit for cloud computing. With this influx and distribution of big data to our television network, web and mobile platforms, as well as all of our APIs, we need an incredible global compute and network presence.
Turns out, a cloud that would help us get there was already in the works at Verizon. As part of a long-term strategic plan to become an end-to-end technology player, Verizon started putting together the building blocks that would become its new Infrastructure-as-a-Service and object offering: Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage. To us, this made total sense. Verizon has assets which differentiate them from other technology providers. Starting with the global IP network, followed by ultra-secure and redundant data centers, and combined with being one of the largest security practices in the world, Verizon was the ideal candidate to revolutionize the cloud space and enable businesses, like The Weather Company, to simply change the rules we had come to accept in the cloud.
At The Weather Company, we are relying on Verizon to help us transform our business. Verizon Cloud is changing our core IT operations, including moving away from operating 10 data centers, migrating critical workload applications to the cloud and leveraging it for big data analysis and decision making.
Verizon is offering its compute power and storage capabilities tied with a strong network within a well-engineered infrastructure that allows for low costs and unmatched control compared to other public cloud environments. It’s a wonderful example of competition and capitalism at work.
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