Cloud Computing Providers Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Providers

Cloud Computing Service Providers

In analyzing 3tera, the RackSpace Cloud and GoGrid as to which is the best Cloud Computing vendor, their relative strengths and weaknesses both from a functional as well as security standpoint have been taken into account. All three are considered to be viable competitors in the Cloud Computing and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure and Services market.

Functionality Assessment

Of the three, 3tera, due to the acquisition by Computer Associates (CA) in February, 2010 (Information Week, 2010) has the best potential for continued R&D investment to scale beyond North America, a weakness all three vendors share. 3Tera offers hosting and co-location globally and has taken the strategy of investing heavily in their AppLogic platform, which is well suited for creating private Clouds within the four walls of an organization. Their acquisition by CA will also fuel the development of the online marketplace they had launched in 2009 (Krill, 2009). CA acquired this small company to launch more aggressively into enterprise accounts that IBM is taking away with their expanded SaaS and Cloud Computing offerings. The acquisition is a defensive move by CA to complete more effectively with IBM. As a result of their global operations and the AppLogic platform being primarily used for within companies, their security levels are exceptional for the size of company they are (Information Management, 2009).

Of the two remaining companies, the RackSpace Cloud (often just called RackSpace) is considered a market leader due to its focus on scalable managed hosting and cloud infrastructure services. The company has also invested heavily into customer service and it is common for smaller accounts to have a personal manager who takes care of their account. The use of open source technologies and the reliance on self-managed platform applications keep the costs down. For all of these benefits, RackSpace has been growing exceptionally fast and has faced scalability and reliability challenges over time. From a security standpoint the platform that the company relies on is secure to the 256 bit encryption level and supports periodic audits of security as well. There is also extensive Service Level Agreement (SLA)s support for security checks and audits. GoGrid is unique in that it openly makes the promise of 100% uptime in their SLAs and has a hybrid cloud approach of combining virtual and dedicated database servers to allow for a high level of security between systems. GoGrid also has a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for managing connections to other clouds securely. It is widely used as a Cloud Computing platform for self-managed applications and has found favor with start-ups who like the pay-as-you-go model.