Midyear Cloud Review
July 31, 2014
Grazed from Hosting.com. Author: Editorial Staff.
In our July 14th blog post, How Stable is Your Cloud Provider?, we gave examples of some “seismic shifts” occurring in the cloud computing industry today. The industry witnessed a high level of volatility in the first half of 2014 as cloud solution providers (CSPs) anxiously watched their status slip in Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Cloud Hosting, went on massive acquisition sprees, or slashed their pricing for the umpteenth time. Following are some insights into what we can expect in the second half of 2014.
1) Public, Unmanaged IaaS Providers Will Continue to Race to the Bottom
If the recent pricing moves by Google and Amazon are any indication, we can expect to see cost cutting accelerating in 2014. Last March, Google cut its prices massively, reducing the prices of on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30%-85%. Amazon fired back the next day with a blog post that begins with the sentence: “It is always fun to write about price reductions.” This price cut by Amazon is the 42nd since 2008, and there is no indication that they will stop anytime soon…
Google and Amazon can afford to implement multiple price cuts because their cloud business is being funded by other areas of their respective companies. However, consumers should be cautious about jumping on these “deals.” These low-touch providers are completely unmanaged – leaving the customer alone to build and support their entire application stack, staff up for availability and security monitoring around the clock, and even perform routine maintenance, such as backups and patching…
Read more from the source @ http://www.hosting.com/cloud-computing-blog/midyear-cloud-review/