Top 10 cloud storage providers, according to Gartner

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Gartner lists Amazon, AT&T, Google, HP, IBM and Microsoft among what it says are the top 10 cloud storage providers.  According to its survey, about 19% of organisations are using the cloud for production computing, while 20% are using public cloud storage services.  That means there’s a pretty good sized market for the cloud, and specifically cloud storage. Gartner predicted in 2012 $109 billion was spent on cloud computing, a 20% increase from the year before.

But the cloud is a big industry too, with a lot of vendors seemingly having a cloud strategy today. So where do potential customers start? Recently, Gartner released a list of the top 10 cloud storage providers, based on enterprise capabilities. Below is a description of each, based on pros, cons, strengths and weaknesses…

Amazon Web Services

Like many other aspects of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is considered a market leader in cloud storage. It’s been an early and aggressive player in the market and its services drive offerings from competitors, Gartner says, while its pricing is the "industry reference point." Its Simple Storage Service (S3) is the basic object storage, while Elastic Block Storage is for storage volumes. AWS keeps innovating too. Earlier this year AWS announced Glacier, a long-term, low-cost archival storage services. More recently, at its first-ever user conference, AWS announced Redshift, a cloud-based data warehousing service…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/cloud-computing/3418594/top-10-cloud-storage-providers-according-gartner/