12 Cloud Computing Providers Compared

InformationWeek issued a new report comparing 12 cloud computing providers of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) across a range of criteria, including services, pricing, contract rules and platform support. The report demonstrates the increasing depth and sophistication of vendors in the IaaS space.

The analysis looks at 3tera, Amazon, IBM, GoGrid, and Rackspace (all providers we've profiled), as well as others like AT&T, Savvis, Skytap and Zimory. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does give those thinking about these services another evaluation tool at their fingertips.

And while the report doesn't grade the companies against one another or draw any specific conclusions around which vendor is best, it clearly shows those competing for mind-share and wallet-share are no longer simply focused on price (although competition has driven aggressive pricing and new pricing models).

Instead, vendors have put effort in differentiating their services based on "security, availability and expertise" for a given customer segment (e.g. Fortune 500) or market area (e.g. high-performance computing). A good example is the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which gives customers a direct, private connection to Amazon EC2 through a virtual private network connection to their own network. Another example is IBM's Computing on Demand, where customers pay an annual fee and per CPU used to get dedicated servers rather than virtual ones, "though companies can run virtual machines on top of those servers."