The Computer Weekly guide to Cloud Computing

Bob Tarzey

3/5

A growing marketplace for cloud computing services

While there are a number of major players, many managed hosting providers are also providing IaaS and/or PaaS as an alternative to their traditional dedicated infrastructure hosting services. Add to this the number of ISVs now offering full or partial SaaS and the aggregated market these organisations represent is easily as big as that of their higher profile counterparts. Choosing a supplier will depend on the type of platform required, the SLA on offer and the guarantees that can be offered around security and governance. Perhaps the most high profile IaaS platform is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Other examples are Attenda’s RTI and Rackspace’s Cloud Servers (currently in beta and being fully launched in the next few months). PaaS platforms included Microsoft’s Azure which is based Windows and .NET (needless to say) and Google’s AppEngine (Java based). Some PaaS offerings have a particular focus; force.com (the original salesforce.com platform) only supports applications developed using

Cloud computing is changing the way IT deparrtments buy IT. Businesses have a range of paths to the cloud, including infrastructure, platforms and applications that are available from cloud providers as online services. Many people may be confused by the range of offerings and the terminology used to describe them and will be unsure of the risk and benefits. This gallery, written for Computer Weekly, by Bob Tarzey of Quocirca aims to provide further insight.

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