In the Great White North, an on-premise private cloud

American tech company CSC announced this morning that it would expand cloud services to Canada, making available its BizCloud product, which attempts to unify the best attributes of public and private clouds.

CSC calls it "the first on-premise private cloud billed as a service and ready for workloads in 10 weeks." That's an awful lot of qualifiers, but the overarching goal is to help governments and businesses more quickly adopt private cloud deployments.

BizCloud is a bit more turnkey than a DIY private cloud. It's based on VCE's Vblock infrastructure, which combines VMWare's virtualization, Cisco's unified computing and EMC's storage and security. The hybrid approach keeps mission-critical applications on premises and the rest  -- backup, disaster recovery, development, et cetera -- off-premesis, but still in Canada.

CSC says that workloads that are run in the cloud can be scaled up or down according to demand, and are billed from the same rate card as off-premises cloud models. BizCloud was first launched in the U.S. last February, and is already in the wild in Europe, Australia and Asia.

"Cloud computing has tremendous promise in Canada," IDC Canada's Mark Schrutt said. "Up to this point, many Canadian businesses have been sitting on the sideline waiting for in-Canada solutions. IDC's research finds that 60 percent of buyers prefer in-Canada IaaS offerings."