How Adversity Is Creating Opportunities In The Global Marketplace

The Roman poet, Horace, said: “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.” The current cloud environment exemplifies precisely what Horace would see as an adversarial landscape that is creating opportunities for innovation and talent exploitation. However, these are indeed prosperous times for organizations in the virtual server realm.
Cloud wars among top Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers are reaching full combat status. Two of the top contenders, Google and AWS, are battling it out for territory and market share. Here’s a brief summary of what differentiates each organization and some of the major weapons in their arsenal.
In the beginning. . .
Amazon emerged as a compute, storage, database service company

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings include ability to scale-up and scale-down on demand, flexible resource pricing, virtual storage, computing and management services.
Growth and expansion . . .
The global market is coming around. Many of the previous barriers, both real and perceived, that have kept smaller enterprises and cautious decision-makers in health and legal industries on the sidelines, have been eliminated. While cloud adoption rates continue to rise and most of the IaaS and PaaS providers are seeing steady growth, Amazon continues to dominate the virtual landscape. With 28% of market share, compared to Google’s 5%, it is obvious the other major players will have to regroup and refocused to capture more territory.
Google recently launched their version of “cold storage,” similar to Amazon’s Glacier product which emerged on the market in 2012. Both companies charge similar rates. At first glance, it appears Google’s Nearline has the advantage. Nearline users have almost instantaneous access to parked data (3 seconds) compared to Glacier access which is slightly slower at a rate of 3 to 5