Cloud Computing Providers

The classification of cloud providers continues to expand. Gartner and InfoWorld (amongst others) have created diagrams trying to explain the different categories of Cloud providers and services. My view below encompasses both their views as well as tries to rationalize the categories in a slightly different way than those papers.

Types of Cloud Services

I will not explain each box – the names are relatively self explanatory + you probably have read enough material that explains each box in more detail than I can on a blog.

This view of the categorization should help clarify that IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) is typically a collection of multiple cloud services – which can be consumed from one or multiple vendors to put together a comprehensive solution for a customer. Security is an emerging area of focus amongst Cloud Providers. As Cloud Computing emerged, enough noise was raised about security of data. This was addressed typically using encryption mechanisms for data at rest and data in motion. As more and more companies starting leveraging the cloud (either in SaaS models or as extensions to their data centers), it is important to see how security requirements are evolving.

It is interesting to see companies want Single Sign On and User Provisioning between their on-premise applications and their SaaS applications. Several startups are emerging in this space that focus on seamlessly integration “User Identity” information for SaaS.

In many of the categories; there are very mature providers offering products and services. However, some of the areas are still emerging. Specifically, Security, Governance, Testing, Management and Integration are probably the most nascent of these areas. I might explore some of these areas in future blog postings.