Public clouds have become a integral part of most enterprises. Although Amazon leads the cloud vendor market, other big vendors have recently engaged in a lively competition for your enterprise business.
A CIO Journal post from Tom Loftus describes how Amazon, Microsoft, and Google “lead customers to believe that competing cloud vendors, who make many similar promises, differentiate themselves in few ways beyond price.” The comparison table he provides shows a summary of differentiaion for cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google:
| Microsoft | Amazon | ||
| Custom cloud service level agreement | No | Yes | No |
| Provide product roadmap to customers | Yes | Yes | Limited |
| Provide single point of contact by name | Limited | Limited | No |
| Compensation for downtime | Service credit | Service credit | Service credit |
| Reporting uptime | Public dashboard | Public dashboard | Public dashboard |
| Publicly post audits | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Audits of controls by customers/potential customers | No | No | No |
| Customer-led penetration testing* | Yes | Yes | No |
| Response-time to notify customers of breach | Promptly | Based on applicable law | Per contractual terms |
| Customers choose cloud storage location | Yes | Yes | Yes |
For the complete post, click here.
Now what’s missing here? No fault to Tom, he’s not trying to fill the missing piece—it’s the real user experience as customers of these vendors. Who’s using these cloud services and how do vendor promises stack up against reality?
That’s what IT Central Station is for—the Yelp for CIOs according to the Wall Street Journal!
If you have one of these services now, submit a review if you haven’t already. If you’re looking at the competition, see what others are saying. Engage in a dicussion with other users who’ve been using a cloud service from any of these vendors.
Your influence and experience helps to shape the market for these enterprise-level offerings. Get started today by clicking on one of the links below:
