Verizon Business has extended availability of its on-demand, “cloud-based” Computing as a Service (CaaS) solution to the company’s Amsterdam data center. The announcement reinforces the company’s strategy of expanding cloud-computing deployment resources around the globe to meet the stringent security, performance regulatory requirements of business customers.

In June, Verizon Business announced its CaaS offering with the provisioning of the service in its U.S. data center based in Beltsville, Md. Additional CaaS locations are planned in the Asia-Pacific region in 2010.

The service – which leverages Verizon’s global IP infrastructure and data centers – enables mid-market and larger companies to use a Web-based portal to employ computing resources in the quantities and duration dictated by the companies’ business needs. As a result, businesses pay only for the resources used and avoid having to build out for peak capacity requirements by buying new equipment and adding staff.

The Amsterdam location particularly benefits companies doing business in Europe and elsewhere that need to operate under a “safe harbor” privacy framework that calls for a European-hosted location, or want to use facilities located closer to their European locations.

The Amsterdam data center is part of Verizon Business’ secure global infrastructure, which the company’s network and security professionals manage under a program developed by the Verizon Cybertrust Security team. The company has built strong security features into its CaaS offering. These include secure connections to customer-provisioned resources, as well as a multi-tiered network with a virtual firewall, and an audit trail for all changes. Verizon CaaS is supported by rigorous service level agreements to ensure enterprise-class performance and rapid server provisioning.

Customers can also opt for a third tier of optional, add-on security services including identity and access management, host intrusion detection, application vulnerability assessment, network application assessment, and professional security services.

Verizon Business worked with a broad range of technology providers to deliver its next-generation computing solution. This advanced architecture lets customers provision both physical and virtual server environments to best accommodate the type of application being deployed. For example, a business may want to use a virtual environment for staging and development. For business-critical applications, such as database servers, businesses may choose a physical server infrastructure that lets them customize servers as well as select from a range of server configurations.