How to Pick Cloud Contenders Among Pretenders

Grazed from Wired. Author: Patrick Kerpan.

Infrastructure is the most basic level of cloud computing. A cloud provider offers you, as a cloud application owner or user, the ability to run your business application without managing the underlying physical resources of CPU, storage, network and memory. Public/private cloud IaaS is multi-tenant access to the physical resources ) where you can launch virtual machines (VMs) as needed in the cloud.

Cloud commoditizes the infrastructure — hence Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or the difficult to pronounce, “IaaS”. Regardless of deployment model or provider, you should have access to infrastructure and the ability to purchase VMs. So now that you’re shopping for infrastructure, what should you look for in a cloud provider?…

Beware of the Pretenders

As public and private cloud develop, core cloud features and IaaS are on the path toward to commoditization. “Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, are the fastest-growing segment of the market,” a February 2013 report from Gartner announced. IaaS grew to “42.4 percent in 2012 to $6.1 billion and expected to grow 47.3 percent in 2013 to $9 billion.” Yet, Forrester Research found “nearly 70% of what IT administrators claim are private clouds are not.” In the growing market, it could be easy for some providers to fake cloud offerings…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/04/how-to-pick-cloud-contenders-among-pretenders/