Although there are a number of suppliers in the Cloud market, most accept and note the primary dominance of Amazon, and the distinctions in scale of the Cloud that they operate.

The Cloud providers market is like McDonalds – S, M, L and Super-size!

So while there are announcements all the time about hosting providers launching Clouds to take on goliath, there’s only a few big boys playing around at the Super-size level: Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft.

So in contrast you definitely take note when that player is Google - announcing their own IaaS, Google Compute.

If you were to pick any one who could be considered a large enough data centre operator to trouble someone of Amazon’s size it would be Google – There’s no doubt they understand, and operate, very large-scale computing.

So leveraging that scale is as smart a move with them as it is with AWS, and of course more competition is always good for buyers.

Google Enterprise

This means one first question for enterprise CIO’s to consider is what is the whole Google Cloud suite – They now offer IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and this comprehensive “full Cloud stack” approach is very interesting from an outsourcing point of view. This is what I describe as ‘Google Enterprise’ best practices.

Customers would be able to explore a whole exploitation of what will be one of the world’s most powerful Cloud environments, catering for different app and functional needs, eg.

• IaaS for legacy applications
• PaaS for more ad-hoc marketing-driven online applications
• SaaS for switching to Google Apps for the office suite

Cloud service brokerage

Therefore the fundamental question is how this different set of services can be unified into a single customer outsourcing scenario, and how you would then also bring in and integrate with the other Cloud services: Salesforce.com, Azure for .net, etc.

Most large corporations have this spread mix of IT and we’re likely to see it across Clouds too, as those suppliers also specialize.

This is a good thing and especially if Cloud Service Broker models will help unite these into singular delivery methods that support business initiatives like Single Customer View and so forth.

Related articles

• Always On Cloud with Google Compute (canadacloud.net)
• What Are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS? (cloudcomputing.sys-con.com)