Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting
December 22, 2010
Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting:
Cloud infrastructure as a service has evolved primarily from the Web hosting market, but the cloud has created new opportunities for cost savings and business agility. The market is immature, the services are all unique and evolving rapidly, and vendors must be chosen with care.
For the past five years, the Web hosting market has been evolving toward on-demand infrastructure provisioned on a flexible, pay-as-you-go basis; the majority of hosting customers now obtain at least some of their infrastructure on demand, and most new hosting contracts include on-demand services. The market for traditional Web hosting services, especially for Internet and intranet Web content and applications, continues to grow.
However, during the past two years, the introduction of cloud computing offerings has radically accelerated innovation in the hosting market. Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has significantly expanded the use cases that IT buyers are considering outsourcing. This evolution has quickly changed the vendor landscape, bringing many new entrants to rapid prominence, as well as decreasing the relevance of hosters that have failed to make this shift. Cloud IaaS is still an emerging market, but we forecast that, by the end of 2011, these services will account for almost 25% of the overall hosting market (excluding colocation and mass-market hosting).
Although Gartner’s IT buyer clients continue to generate a significant volume of inquiries related to traditional Web hosting, the bulk of their inquiries is now focused on sourcing cloud compute IaaS. As a result of this shift, we have changed our inclusion and evaluation criteria for the Magic Quadrant. We have based our 2010 evaluation on the three most common use cases for outsourced hosting, as follows:
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Self-managed IaaS, for cost-effective agile replacement of traditional data center infrastructure.
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Lightly managed IaaS, for customers who wish to primarily self-manage but want the provider to be responsible for routine operations tasks.
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Complex managed hosting, for customers who want to outsource operational responsibility for the infrastructure underlying Web content and applications.
Choose a provider based on its ability to provide a cost-effective architecture and high-quality customer experience for your envisioned use case.