Cloud storage Market overview

Public cloud storage is infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that provides object storage services through a REST API using Internet protocols. The service is stand-alone with no requirement for additional managed services. Vendors supply their core storage services off-premises, and include on-demand, elastic storage capabilities in a self-service model. The service price is based on capacity, data transfer and/or other access services. Stored data exists in a multitenant environment, and users access that data through the Internet or dedicated network connectivity.

Cloud Provider	Strengths	Weakness
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a pioneer in public cloud storage services, having offered an object storage service for more than eight years. AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is accessible through RESTful API. AWS also offers a persistent block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which serves as virtual machine (VM) storage; and a long-term archival storage, Amazon Glacier. All storage services are available in 10 regions (four in the U.S., one in Europe, one in South America and four in Asia/Pacific, with a limited public release in China). To enable hybrid cloud storage deployments, it offers AWS Storage Gateway, a cloud storage gateway device that presents an on-premises Internet SCSI (iSCSI) block and virtual tape library (VTL) interface. Amazon CloudFront, an integrated content delivery network (CDN), provides performance optimization for distributed content	AWS has a proven, well-rounded storage portfolio and is highly innovative, agile and responsive to customer needs. AWS often launches new capabilities and services well ahead of the competition. Its storage services, Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier in particular, enjoy high brand recognition among prospective customers. AWS offers storage services in 10 regions (including AWS GovCloud in the U.S.), with more than 50 edge locations worldwide. This geographic reach, combined with its strong channel partner ecosystem, gives AWS a clear advantage in serving a wide range of customers by geography, organization size, vertical industry and use cases. The Amazon S3 API is evolving as a de facto standard for developers writing storage applications for the cloud. It is supported by leading independent software vendors (ISVs), such as backup, archiving and on-premises object storage vendors, which move data to the AWS cloud	Competitors, particularly Google and Microsoft, are increasingly challenging AWS's leadership on storage pricing. AWS's lack of detailed architectural information for services such as Amazon Glacier can sometimes frustrate customers that are looking for better transparency from cloud providers
A&T focuses on the enterprise market space by enticing AT&T clients to move data into the cloud or building relationships with new clients. The storage service is built on the EMC Atmos platform, enabling hybrid storage environments for clients committed to the Atmos platform. AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service offers basic object-based storage, as well as value-added services such as connectivity based on AT&T's NetBond service, storage for the medical imaging community, and a file synchronization and sharing capability built on EMC's Syncplicity product. The service enables customers to easily apply data resiliency policies that include local replication, remote replication, compression and write once, read many (WORM) capabilities.	AT&T has an enterprise-focused product and sales strategy, and broad experience working with large-enterprise customers. AT&T provides extensive networking functionality for its customers and for enterprises willing to leverage AT&T's Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network or 3G/4G infrastructure. The emphasis is on capabilities that are of high interest for enterprise customers — security and compliance, industry offerings such as medical imaging services, and turnkey storage services such as file synchronization and sharing	Market traction for cloud compute capabilities is limited for IT leaders expecting to make the transition from storing data in the cloud to a cloud compute environment that uses that data. Global data center regional support is limited, which will hamper organizations that must meet stringent data sovereignty requirements. AT&T is a price follower with capacity pricing that is high compared with large competitors
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) from Google offers object storage and block storage services (Google Compute Engine persistent disks associated with VMs). The object service supports two RESTful programming interfaces — XML and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) — to create applications that can store data in the Google cloud. Google cloud storage services are available in North America, EMEA and the Asia/Pacific region. There is an emphasis on batch computing use cases, which are enabled by direct connections to Apache Hadoop and Google BigQuery engines	Google is a thought leader in building efficient, distributed data center infrastructures, and GCP leverages a number of those technologies and process innovations. Google has deployed an extensive global network infrastructure that connects its data centers and backbone to edge points of presence (POPs) in more than 100 countries, which benefits its enterprise customers. Google has shown its intentions to be an aggressive price leader through its scale of operations and deep pockets, reaffirming its commitment to the cloud storage business.	Google is ramping up its product management, professional services and support to better align with enterprise organizations, which means customers must be patient as those engagement capabilities evolve. With Google Apps as the point of entry for Google into the enterprise, there has been less focus on building a strong ecosystem of partners focused on IaaS use cases in enterprise settings. As a result, its channel partners tend to be small and less experienced in serving enterprise customers for cloud storage use cases. Google's cloud storage offering, although compliant with a number of regulations, is a general-purpose platform with no explicit vertical services for customers in regulated industries, such as financial services, healthcare or government
HP HP offers object storage and block storage (associated with VMs) under the HP cloud brand. Object storage is based on OpenStack Swift and integrated with the Akamai CDN. HP cloud is available on the East Coast and in the Western region of the U.S. HP cloud storage continues to grow incrementally since its general availability in 2013. In 1Q14, HP reported double-digit revenue growth in its cloud, security and big data services. Recent statements by company officials indicate continued high investment in cloud technologies and related services. SLAs are in line with the industry or slightly better at 99.95% availability per month. The HP Helion OpenStack platform, introduced in May 2014, enables customers to build private clouds on the Helion platform that interoperate with the HP public cloud storage offerings or other non-HP OpenStack-based services. HP does not offer connectivity directly from its storage equipment to its public cloud storage offerings. However, it has partnerships with gateway companies, such as Panzura, to close that gap in capability	HP has an OpenStack-based platform that enables storage integration using OpenStack Swift's API, and, thus a wide variety of vendor support is available for creating extensions. As a large, credible enterprise company, HP has the potential and expertise to handle the concerns and engagement expectations of large IT organizations familiar with HP storage, servers and services. There is the potential for tight integration with HP storage products for building hybrid storage infrastructures to bridge on-premises and public cloud storage.	HP is a relatively new entrant in the cloud storage arena. It is still evolving in terms of services and customer engagement models, with limited capabilities outside the U.S. HP is evolving its cloud compute and storage platform based on open-source software (OpenStack), which may slow or limit the introduction of market-leading capabilities to address changing market demands. HP's cloud pricing is based on capacity and usage, but has not kept pace with its larger competitors' price reductions
IBM acquired SoftLayer, a private hosting and cloud IaaS provider. IBM has retired its SmartCloud Enterprise object storage offering in favor of SoftLayer's storage services. SoftLayer's object storage service is based on OpenStack Swift and was introduced in early 2012. IBM's storage services are available from 13 data centers in North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. IBM is unveiling an aggressive global expansion road map for 2015. Through the recent price cuts made in June 2014, IBM has shown intentions to be price-competitive with the other large cloud storage providers	IBM's object storage service is complemented by strong bare-metal compute offerings and an easy-to-use management portal, which makes provisioning easier for cloud and managed storage offerings. IBM's core object storage service is based on OpenStack Swift, which is emerging as a popular API and challenger to AWS S3 API in terms of ecosystem support. For a late entrant, the storage service has commendable geographic availability and reach, which is expected to grow with strong impending investments from IBM	SoftLayer was primarily focused on Web hosting and bare-metal needs of customers in industries such as online services (e.g., gaming customers). Enterprise customers looking at mainstream use cases such as backup, archiving or content distribution need to be cautious in terms of ecosystem support. Product enhancements, innovation and marketing efforts so far for cloud storage have been low, with a greater emphasis on compute capabilities. IBM's portfolio includes on-premises and cloud storage services that have little in common and can be confusing to customers. IBM does not provide an OpenStack distribution or related tools to enable a hybrid cloud. None of its on-premises storage products support tiering to the object storage cloud service
Microsoft Azure offers tight integration with other Microsoft technologies, including server products, system management and various cloud offerings, such as Office 365. Services are available worldwide, including Europe and the Asia/Pacific region, with global expansion planned. Microsoft claims rapid growth of services in the double-digit range. Although Microsoft does not break out specific revenue, the Azure business is estimated to be one of the largest in the cloud space. Microsoft has invested heavily in its infrastructure; some estimates are more than $15 billion. It continues to add customers for Azure and cloud storage services via its object storage service (Azure binary large object [BLOB]) enabled through the StorSimple cloud storage solution interfaces. Microsoft pricing often is in reaction to Amazon's price reductions. For BLOB storage, Microsoft offers conventional on-demand pricing, as well as commitment-based pricing that may include a no-charge StorSimple device to support hybrid infrastructures	Microsoft is an established company with continuing large investments in the cloud infrastructure, indicating positive credibility and longevity. Turnkey delivery of a cloud storage service via the StorSimple gateway simplifies vendor engagement for organizations unable to handle complex vendor relationships. Microsoft has a focus on performance to enable demanding workloads, and on rapid write consistency to enable file services in a collaboration environment	For turnkey engagements based on StorSimple, hybrid storage environments lack support for global file systems and namespaces, unless services such as Distributed File Service (DFS) running in a separate file server are added. Microsoft was a late entrant in IaaS. Although it has gained significant momentum, its partner ecosystem in the storage IaaS market segment continues to be weak. Microsoft has limited partnerships with the major storage vendors, such as EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP and Hitachi Data Systems. Thus, it lacks credentials when used to extend enterprise on-premises storage environments.
Rackspace is a publicly listed company with a strong legacy in managed hosting and public cloud IaaS. It is a co-founder of OpenStack and the primary contributor to the OpenStack Swift project. Rackspace offers object storage (Cloud Files) integrated with the Akamai CDN, block storage (associated with VMs), and cloud backup services, including JungleDisk, which also integrates with AWS S3. Cloud Files storage service is available from Rackspace's data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Hong Kong	Rackspace offers OpenStack distribution with maintenance, services and support. Given its pivotal role in OpenStack, Rackspace has high credibility as a provider of open, interoperable hybrid cloud. Rackspace's pricing is easy to understand: Price is for storage and bandwidth; there are no extra charges for access requests or support	Rackspace has ceded control of the OpenStack foundation. HP and IBM are formidable competitors willing to invest aggressively in building products, services and support capabilities based on OpenStack, challenging Rackspace in OpenStack-based hybrid cloud deployments. Rackspace lacks a strong professional services team and a partner ecosystem to enable rigorous assessment, workload migration and implementation of hybrid cloud storage services globally. Its partnerships with cloud storage gateway vendors and ISVs tend to be weak, and services capabilities are limited to the U.S. Rackspace's global expansion for its cloud storage services has historically been slower than other vendors, even in regions where it was already offering managed hosting.