1 Introduction
The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass provides an overview of vendors and their product or service offerings in a certain market segment. This Leadership Compass focusses on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from Cloud Service providers (CSP) with a global presence.
IaaS provides a form of IT hosting service which requires no up-front capital expenditure. IaaS provides basic computing resources that the customer can use over a network to run software and to store data. There are two distinct uses of IaaS services. In the first - organizations, start-ups especially, use the cloud for agile development without the need to acquire hardware. In the second – it allows a customer to transfer all or part of some existing workloads to the cloud; and this to the so called “Hybrid Cloud” where both cloud and on-premise services are in use. Each of this use cases have differing priorities of needs.
This leadership compass focusses on those IaaS services that cover both needs and that are delivered on a global scale. In this context, global scale means that the service is provided from and is available in multiple geopolitical regions. It has a specific focus on security and compliance aspects from a European perspective.
1.1 Market Segment
The market segments for IaaS services are defined by the scale of operation and the richness of the service provided. There are several well-known global IaaS service providers. In the past, these global providers have been mostly based in the USA. However, there are now new entrants in this field based in other parts of the world. The services provided by the global CSPs are now being complemented by CSPs that provide more specialized offerings. These may be based on geographic locality, regulatory compliance or the level of professional services and service management that are included.
This leadership compass focusses on those IaaS services that cover both needs described above and that are delivered on a global scale. In this context, global scale means that the service is provided from and is available in multiple geopolitical regions including the EU/EEA.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides basic computing resources that the customer can use to run software (both operating systems and applications) and to store data. IaaS allows the customer to transfer an existing workload to the Cloud with minimal if any change needed. The customer does not manage or control the underlying Cloud infrastructure but remains responsible for managing the OS and applications.
Increasingly IaaS providers offer extensions beyond this basic functionality to support the development of new applications (DevOps) and to facilitate migrating existing workloads into their cloud service. To facilitate this service offerings may include pre-packaged middleware, databases and development tools.
The responsibility for security and compliance in the use of cloud services is shared between the customer and the cloud service provider (CSP). The customer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but is responsible for managing the OS and applications. The customer also remains responsible for compliance with laws and regulations governing the processing of data. The CSP is responsible for the management, security and compliance of the infrastructure providing the service.
