Savvis is moving more convincingly into standard cloud services. The managed hosting provider launched Savvis Direct as a beta compute service Monday, following on its Dec. 3 launch of Symphony Cloud Storage, its long-term storage equivalent to Amazon’s S3.

Savvis comes to the party with some of its own particular bells and whistles. To provide cloud services, it’s marrying its experience in managing large data centers with CenturyLink’s networking savvy. CenturyLink is the third-largest carrier in the United States, and that means if you’re already a CenturyLink business customer, you can move your data between CenturyLink cloud centers at no additional charge on the private network.

There could be advantages to that. With security the number one concern about public cloud data centers, Savvis can offer its telecom services users a chance to access cloud servers over private lines. That could easily prove an attractive option versus relying on the public Internet for archiving sensitive business data, as say, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services customers do.
Network Computing