Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market

Sector RoadMap: the European
cloud infrastructure market
Paul Miller
a cloud report
Sector RoadMap: the European cloud
infrastructure market
03/26/2014
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2. INTRODUCTION
3. DISRUPTION VECTORS
4. COMPANY ANALYSIS
5. OUTLOOK AND PREDICTIONS
6. ABOUT PAUL MILLER
7. ABOUT GIGAOM RESEARCH
8. COPYRIGHT
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Companies looking to adopt public cloud infrastructure for use in Europe must navigate a
complex set of choices in selecting the best service for their needs. The scale, price, and
continuing innovation of U.S.-based market leaders such as Amazon, Rackspace, and
Microsoft are compelling but undermined to a degree by data protection concerns and last
year’s revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) snooping. Less-visible European
providers may offer the perception of greater security, a network of data centers more
closely aligned to the distribution of customers across the continent, and a support
operation better suited to European cultural and linguistic diversity.
This Sector RoadMapTM identifies and categorizes the principal disruption vectors at
play in this market segment and profiles a set of the significant solution providers in the
space.
Amongst the companies surveyed, those with a strong multi-site European presence
found themselves at an immediate advantage. Security and data territoriality remain
significant concerns, particularly in Europe, but each of the providers discussed here has
a credible position with respect to securing customer data inside the European Economic
Area. The clearest point of differentiation for many customers lies in the strength of the
partner ecosystem and the extent of interoperability with other systems. Current global
market leader Amazon Web Services dominates in both of these vectors for now.
Each of the companies profiled below offers a robust and credible set of products, and all
are able to identify satisfied – and often enthusiastic – advocates amongst their
customers. At the end of the day, prospective customers for these services need to
undertake their own assessment of their particular requirements and select accordingly. If
you and all of your customers are in Austria or Croatia or France, for example, then
selecting a cloud provider operating from Ireland or the UK may not be the best choice.
For others, access to a global network of data centers may be critical, as may
demonstrable interoperability with a private cloud running in their own data center or
hosting provider. And for some, the overriding concern will be their mistrust of dealing
with a company headquartered outside the European Union, even though that company
guarantees to normally store European customer data inside Europe.
Each of these providers has their merits. Whether they are the best fit for your company
and your workloads will depend upon your own assessment of relative strengths and
weaknesses.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Key:
▪ Number indicates company’s relative strength across all vectors
▪ Size of ball indicates company’s relative strength along individual vector
Source: Gigaom Research
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Introduction
Last year’s revelations of widespread hacking, eavesdropping, and general snooping by
intelligence agencies such as the United States’ NSA and the United Kingdom’s
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) drew attention to the difficult set of
choices faced by companies wishing to host services in the cloud for operations in
Europe.
European politicians repeatedly suggested that the existing Safe Harbor agreement, which
lets U.S. firms process data on EU citizens, should be torn up and that plans to update it
should be put on hold. European technology providers like Norwegian startup Jottacloud
explicitly marketed their products as “protected against U.S. legislation,” and even
established firms, including Deutsche Telekom, unveiled services that claimed to keep
data inside national borders.
And yet, despite earlier fears that cloud vendors could lose up to $180 billion over three
years as a result of the ongoing revelations, analyst firms such as IDC increasingly
suggest that spending on cloud will continue to grow.
In the midst of political outrage, media exposés, and marketing spin, cloud providers
continue to sell, and cloud customers continue to buy. Security featured prominently in
lists of executive concerns about the cloud long before Edward Snowden shared his first
classified document. But security is simply one consideration amongst many, and it is
simply – and self-evidently, given continued sales – not true to suggest that increased
concern about government-sanctioned snooping will bring the cloud market to a
premature end.
In this Sector RoadMap, we explore a number of the factors that must be borne in mind
when selecting a cloud infrastructure provider. Specifically we look at this in the context
of Europe, considering the choices facing companies based here as well as those that
must be made by foreign organizations wishing to do business with Europeans. By
identifying – and independently scoring – a number of key disruption vectors, we seek to
demonstrate some of the complexities inherent to operating in this still-evolving space.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Disruption vectors
Source: Gigaom Research
In order to assess Europe’s cloud infrastructure market, we identify six broad trends, or
disruption vectors. These are areas where both established and emergent providers should
compete to seek advantage.
All vendors identified in this report are affected to varying degrees by the same
disruption vectors, but each has chosen to focus their messaging and their technical
capability in slightly different areas. This is, at least in part, evident in the scores they
achieve in our weightings. These differences are also further explored in the later part of
this report, where we discuss each vendor in turn.
We have weighted the disruption vectors in terms of their relative importance. These
vectors are the areas in which companies will successfully leverage large-scale disruptive
shifts to gain market success in the form of sustained growth in market share and
revenue. These are the disruption vectors that will continue to shape the space over the
next 12 to 24 months:
▪ Location sensitivity
▪ Interoperability
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
▪ Security and compliance
▪ Simplicity
▪ High-performance computing
▪ Ecosystem variety
Location sensitivity
Resources placed in the cloud are, at least in theory, available to be accessed from
anywhere. Remote branch offices, employees checking in from an airport or hotel room,
and customers browsing your site from the other side of the planet all have access. But
those cloud resources are still sitting on a server somewhere, and that server is in a data
center connected to other parts of the network with cables along which data can only
move at the speed of light. Physical distance from the server or congestion of the network
between the server and its users increase the risk of poor application performance. In
high-speed businesses like algorithmic trading in the financial services, fractions of a
second mean the difference between profitable trades and loss-making ones. Even in the
slower world of e-commerce, sites that feel slow are likely to drive prospective customers
away. European companies such as Interoute make much of their continent-spanning
network, with 10 data centers and 31 colocation facilities bringing services as close to
customers as possible. On the other hand, competitors like GreenQloud are quick to point
out that their European customers appear happy with connectivity to the company’s two
Icelandic data centers. For many workloads, performance within the data center can be
more important than the speed at which data moves in and out.
In Europe, local laws and politics place additional emphasis on the importance of
location. European countries typically pass strict laws about the places in which
personally identifiable information about European citizens can be processed or stored.
Agreements such as the Safe Harbor arrangement with the United States make it possible
to move a lot of this personally identifiable information to U.S. servers for processing,
but despite evidence that U.S. authorities police the process, European companies and
consumers have proved uncomfortable with this. The steady flow of negative press
during 2013 only served to increase this discomfort. There is growing enthusiasm for
storing and processing data within European borders whether or not this is strictly
required by current legislation, and local providers have been quick to advertise their
European (or national) credentials. For some particularly sensitive government data, there
is also a noticeable trend toward storing and processing data within the country of origin,
even avoiding the use of data centers located in neighboring EU member states. Some of
the rationale behind this may be a fear of commercial espionage, but political decisions
about being seen to support local providers also play a role, despite coming very close to
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
breaking European rules requiring a fair and competitive procurement process across
member states.
Cloud infrastructure providers without at least one physical data center in Europe are
unlikely to see much traction in the market. Those with data centers in Europe will appeal
to a range of different use cases, some of which require real proximity for performance,
legal, political, or PR reasons, whilst others can comfortably use a data center anywhere
within the EU or even the broader European Economic Area (the EU, plus countries like
Iceland and Norway).
Deutsche Telekom, with a network of German data centers, is well placed to serve the
needs of its primary customer base – German enterprises and foreign companies
operating in Germany. The company therefore scores relatively well for our first vector,
despite not being as well placed as a competitor like Interoute when it comes to servicing
other parts of the European market. Interoute, with its continent-spanning network, takes
the top spot in this category. Amazon and SoftLayer, with just one European data center
each, score 3. CloudSigma and GreenQloud, with data centers in Switzerland and Iceland
respectively, aren’t actually located in the EU. Their countries ratify, emulate, or exceed
most of Europe’s legislation here, meaning that for the vast majority of use cases an
Icelandic or Swiss data center can be considered the same as an EU one. But for some
customers, the perception of lying outside Europe is damaging, hence the slightly lower
score.
Interoperability
As the cloud market continues to evolve, customers consistently say they are keen to
avoid committing too early to a single provider or a single set of technologies.
Interoperability is frequently cited as a major consideration in selecting providers, both to
enable integration with existing on-premise IT infrastructure and to decrease the risk of
being locked in by the proprietary systems and workflows of a single cloud provider. At
one level, of course, basic computing tasks will run pretty consistently on the virtual
machines offered by most cloud providers. The complexity and the risk of
interoperability challenges increase as customers grow dependent upon proprietary
modifications or tweaks added by cloud providers in order to optimize their systems or to
differentiate themselves from their competitors. The growing interest in multi-cloud
management platforms is, in part, a response to customer requirements in this area.
Enthusiasm for open source cloud software such as OpenStack, CloudStack, and Open
Nebula also has the potential to translate into a set of far more interoperable cloud
environments. There is little evidence of this so far, and other than GreenQloud, none of
the companies surveyed below have made a significant effort to deliver a public cloud
infrastructure in the European market based closely upon one of these open source
projects.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Despite the emphasis placed upon interoperability in what customers say, we see the
major cloud providers continuing their strategy of adding value-added features and
capabilities that do add value but that also increase lock-in and decrease the ease with
which a customer might move elsewhere. Smaller providers too continue to attract
customers despite offering non-standard versions of open source cloud software
(GreenQloud runs a modified version of CloudStack) or even running on their own
homegrown cloud infrastructure (as Brightbox does).
Interoperability is something customers always say they want, and who wouldn’t? Their
procurement behavior would suggest that other considerations often remain more
important in the purchasing process. As a result, this vector is weighted as least important
in our analysis. Amazon, with its much-emulated application programming interfaces
(APIs) and its broad feature-set, takes the top spot in this criterion; it remains the cloud
with which everyone else wants to interoperate. Amongst the other companies, alignment
with significant open source cloud efforts (GreenQloud) and support for Amazon’s
dominant APIs (GreenQloud, CloudSigma) help achieve a higher score. As IBM and
SoftLayer continue to drift closer to the OpenStack cloud project, it’s possible that
SoftLayer’s score here could rise quite quickly.
Security and compliance
Security and data protection issues, of course, remain a key topic in any discussion
around cloud services today, especially in Europe. Accreditation against standards such
as ISO 27001 offers one way in which data center operators can demonstrate the rigor of
their security procedures, and in some market segments, the lack of this accreditation will
often mean you cannot even be considered. Explicit, demonstrable, and enforceable
policies around physical and network security and the manner in which personally
identifiable information can be stored, accessed, or processed can also be important, as
can accreditation against domain-specific standards such as the Payment Card Industry’s
Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the healthcare sector’s ISO 27799.
Despite these standards and programs such as the Safe Harbor agreement between the
U.S. and EU, many European companies remain uncomfortable with knowingly storing
their data in data centers outside Europe. There is also some concern that data may be at
risk, even when stored in the European data centers of U.S.-headquartered companies.
Accreditations of compliance with relevant standards are increasingly a given in this
market. The extent to which any accredited and responsible cloud operator may still be
subject to authorized disruption by law enforcement agencies or unauthorized disruption
by malicious or criminal attack is far harder to predict. It is possible that European data
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
could legally be seized from a European data center owned and operated by a U.S.headquartered company. But is it likely? And what are the implications of that for your
business and the cloud provider you end up selecting?
Despite their accreditations, procedures, policies, and standards, a U.S.-headquartered
cloud provider is not going to score very highly on this criterion this year. The European
market is cautious, suspicious, and treading very carefully. As a result, both Amazon and
SoftLayer score lower than their European competitors. Deutsche Telekom, with its
network of secure German data centers and its long-term focus on meeting enterprise
security and audit requirements, takes the top spot in this criterion. Customers in other
EU member states will typically look to their own national equivalent to Deutsche
Telekom (BT in the UK, Orange in France, etc.) rather than necessarily shipping data to
Germany.
Simplicity
Rich and expansive sets of highly configurable options often appeal to experienced and
long-term users of a service, but simplicity, clarity, and ease of use usually rate more
highly amongst prospects and new customers trying to understand what’s on offer.
Although perfectly functional, Amazon’s rather spartan web management console can be
off-putting, and the naming of different cloud servers (‘m1.xlarge,’ ‘cr1.8xlarge,’ etc.) is
almost opaque. CloudSigma’s ability to clearly specify exactly how much compute,
storage, and bandwidth you require or the smaller set of predefined server sizes offered
by GreenQloud or Brightbox offer opportunities to differentiate from the more
established providers.
The management interfaces and product choices offered by most cloud providers
operating in Europe can, of course, be learned. Opaque terminology and behavioral
quirks become less important once understood if the overall product is delivering the
capabilities its customers demand at a price point they are willing to bear. But while the
world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure continues to offer a confusing array of
products controlled by a lackluster management interface, there are plenty of
opportunities for smaller players to differentiate and draw attention to themselves.
This is probably the most subjective criterion to rank, but companies tend to score more
highly by offering a clear product proposition managed by an accessible and relatively
intuitive customer management console. Amazon’s wealth of options puts the market
leader at a disadvantage in this criterion, but it’s a disadvantage that could be addressed
through greater investment in the design and functionality of the company’s management
tools.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
High-performance computing
A computer optimized to query a database of customer records may not have the same
specification as one running a website or one forming part of a cluster processing
terabytes of financial information. The corollary to Vector 4’s search for simplicity is the
observation that a large menu of computer types and specifications (as offered by
Amazon) may actually be the best way to appeal to a broad set of different customer use
cases. Others focus on particular subsets of the market and then let falling costs and
technological advances carry the premium and the high performance toward mainstream
utility. CloudSigma was quick to offer solid-state drive storage as an option in its public
cloud offering in 2011 and seized competitive advantage for a while, at least amongst
customers who valued the higher performance of data transfer to and from disk. As others
followed suit, the company completely phased out non-SSD storage last year and offered
a robust performance-based service-level agreement (SLA) to customers. At SoftLayer
(now owned by IBM), the company gained a dedicated following for its bare metal
approach to the cloud and the performance benefits of not needing to run a virtual
machine’s hypervisor as well as the software actually required to complete the job at
hand.
Recognizing that few workloads start, run, and end completely inside a single cloud,
providers are also working to improve their connectivity to the rest of the network and to
the data centers likely already to be used by their customers. Amazon’s DirectConnect
promises high-speed connectivity to other sites, and cloud providers such as CloudSigma
are also signing deals with data center providers like Equinix to ensure similarly rapid
(and secure) connectivity.
As data center use grows, the environmental impact of our computing requirements
remains a significant concern. Companies like GreenQloud market the renewable nature
of their power and cooling, Rackspace in Europe explicitly offsets emissions, and data
center operators put wind, underground water, and the sea to work in reducing costs.
Companies (like Amazon) that offer a range of computing instances optimized for
different high-performance workloads score well in this criterion. CloudSigma, with its
early and sustained investment in fast memory and networking, is also a clear leader.
GreenQloud, with its 100-percent renewable power source, offers a viable way for
customers to grow their computing power without driving up emissions. Even in a period
of financial strain, Europe and Europeans remain broadly supportive of government,
commercial, and individual efforts to reduce environmental impact. Balancing increased
demand for power with a desire to consume – and spend – less remains a significant
challenge.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Ecosystem variety
The core IT infrastructure offered by cloud providers is – increasingly – only part of the
story. Networks of consultants and system integrators experienced in making a particular
cloud offering perform, growing collections of tools designed to integrate with your
chosen cloud’s APIs, and the whole ecosystem of third-parties relying upon, profiting
from, and extending a cloud’s capabilities and reach all potentially add value to your own
implementation. Cloud providers that actively engage with their identified communities
of use (and all of the providers featured here do this to some degree) strengthen their
community and their product and increase their chances of long-term survival.
As with Vector 2, this should be an area in which explicit support for Amazon’s APIs
and/or adoption of a widespread open source alternative like OpenStack or CloudStack
should reap dividends. Early in 2014, there is little real evidence that this is – yet – true.
The majority of customers continue to select their cloud providers for other reasons.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Company analysis
Key:
▪ Number indicates company’s relative strength across all vectors
▪ Size of ball indicates company’s relative strength along individual vector
Source: Gigaom Research
Each of the disruption vectors discussed above has a different influence upon the market.
Companies (like GreenQloud) that adopt Amazon’s dominant storage API may benefit
from Vectors 2 and 6, for example, while struggling to differentiate that aspect of their
business for Vector 5. Taken together, these vectors offer a snapshot of the ways in which
cloud providers in Europe are likely to adapt and grow or shrink as market conditions
evolve.
While it would not be feasible to consider every company offering cloud infrastructure to
the European market, the set discussed below offers a useful snapshot across the industry
and its different facets. The chosen set includes companies actively participating in or
frequently mentioned at a Gigaom Research mapping session on the topic and
encompasses:
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
▪ The dominant global provider of public cloud infrastructure (Amazon) with a
European data center in Ireland and the comprehensive product portfolio against
which all others tend to be measured. Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace are amongst
those likely to score similarly for most criteria;
▪ A small regional provider (Brightbox) with a proprietary cloud platform and a robust
following amongst local developers. There are a large number of similar small
providers spread across Europe that would achieve broadly comparable scores under
this methodology;
▪ A European provider (CloudSigma) with an innovative approach to specifying server
capabilities and an ongoing expansion into other markets;
▪ A national telecommunications company (Deutsche Telekom) diversifying to meet
the changing IT needs of its existing customers, who are predominantly enterprisescale and located in the same country (Germany) as the provider. Former national
telecom companies in other EU countries (BT in the UK, France Telecom [now
Orange] in France, Telefónica in Spain, etc.) would score similarly in most areas;
▪ A European provider (GreenQloud) leveraging the open source CloudStack project
and customer enthusiasm for environmentally sustainable IT;
▪ A continent-spanning provider of networking and data centers (Interoute) arguing
strongly that computing facilities – even in the cloud – need to be close to their
customers;
▪ A niche but interesting provider of bare metal and virtualized cloud infrastructure
(SoftLayer) now backed by the deep pockets and global enterprise ambitions of
services giant IBM.
Amazon Web Services
The largest provider of public cloud infrastructure, with a global footprint that includes a
European data center near Dublin, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud provider
against which others are inevitably measured.
Amazon offers a wide range of services, from basic virtual machines (VMs) rented by the
hour through to more tightly integrated offerings like the Redshift data warehouse and the
Kinesis real-time processing solution. A wide ecosystem of resellers, integrators, and
consultants supports customers of Amazon’s cloud, and the basic APIs used to control
Amazon’s core storage (the Simple Storage Service, S3) and compute (the Elastic
Compute Cloud, EC2) products are widely emulated and supported, even by competitors.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Amazon prices aggressively and frequently cuts prices to put pressure on competitors.
Amazon is not, however, necessarily the cheapest cloud infrastructure provider in every
use case.
After early adoption in the startup community, Amazon is now working hard to attract
enterprise customers, deploying traditional enterprise sales processes and enhancing
enterprise-friendly security and compliance products like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
and Direct Connect.
Amazon has a European data center, and customers are able to specify that data only be
stored and processed in this region. The company is also registered under the Safe Harbor
agreement between the U.S. and the EU. Some prospective customers remain wary that
their data could be seized by U.S. authorities and may prefer to select a provider that does
not have a head office in the United States.
Brightbox
UK-based Brightbox began life in 2005 as a host for Ruby on Rails application
developers before expanding into the provision of more generic cloud services. The
Brightbox cloud launched in 2011 and operates out of two physically separated data
center locations in the north of England. The company continues to nurture close links
with the developer community, mostly in Europe, and offers access to most functionality
via API calls, a simple command line interface, or a new and well-regarded graphical
web console.
Brightbox bills by the minute and permits customers to install any operating system they
like. Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) metadata is supported, making it reasonably
straightforward to migrate virtual machines from Amazon to the Brightbox cloud.
CloudSigma
Based in Switzerland, CloudSigma launched in 2009 with a product that has consistently
emphasized flexibility. While other providers typically offer a fixed menu of server types
and sizes, CloudSigma customers specify precisely what they need in terms of computing
power, storage, RAM, etc. This choice can be daunting for new customers (who may well
over-specify), but for more established customers with a clear understanding of their
computing needs, it can prove extremely cost-effective. The company’s Zurich data
center was joined by a U.S. offering (hosted in Las Vegas) in 2011, and a presence in
Virginia was added last year. The Virginia data center is operated by Equinix and marks
the first tangible result of a recent partnership between the two companies.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
CloudSigma has been prominent in a number of European cloud initiatives, including the
Helix Nebula project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the
European Space Agency, and others.
Deutsche Telekom
Like established telecommunications providers in other parts of Europe and the world,
Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is keen to replace declining telephony revenue by
developing a portfolio of cloud solutions. This includes a range of data center services
offered by Deutsche Telekom’s enterprise IT subsidiary, T-Systems. T-Systems’
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offer, Dynamic Services for Infrastructure (DSI), is
augmented by a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) portal, the Enterprise Marketplace, and a
range of other enterprise-focused products and services.
The DSI product is “available worldwide and is hosted in Germany,” while the Enterprise
Marketplace is only available to German customers. Both make reference to T-Systems’
emphasis upon security and its respect for Germany’s strict laws governing data and
personal information.
Deutsche Telekom’s offerings in this area appear geared almost exclusively toward an
established audience of the company’s existing enterprise clients. Although the
company’s literature discusses the value of being able to elastically scale infrastructure up
and down, this is predominantly intended as a way to manage fluctuating usage patterns;
it’s far more about existing customers adding capacity for short periods rather than new
customers renting a few machines for a couple of hours, days, or weeks.
GreenQloud
GreenQloud sells an IaaS offering based upon a modified version of the Apache
CloudStack open source cloud software and operating out of two green data centers in the
company’s home of Iceland. The company recently added a data center in Washington
State powered from sources that are more than 95 percent renewable in nature. The
company’s core products are the Amazon EC2-compatible Compute Qloud and the
Amazon S3-compatible Storage Qloud.
Iceland is well connected to both Europe and North America, and the company sees
opportunities to serve both markets whilst – protected by Icelandic law – ensuring the
degree of privacy and security necessary to appease the most privacy-sensitive European
organizations.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Interoute
London-based Interoute claims to own and operate “Europe’s largest cloud services
platform,” with an extensive high-speed network, a portfolio of European data centers
and colocation facilities, and connectivity to other markets including Asia, Africa, and
the Americas. Interoute’s IaaS offering is the Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC), which
operates across five European zones to deliver public and private cloud solutions for
customers. Interoute’s presence close to customers in most key European markets is a
strength, backed by free movement of data between their cloud data centers and a
network of local support personnel able to offer native language support in each market.
Interoute’s core proposition and marketing is targeted at the enterprise market, but the
company is also making some effort to attract smaller customers. Their Jump Start
program, for example, offers two free cloud VMs to developers and startups for a period
of 12 months. Large cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft have run similar
programs.
SoftLayer
Founded in the U.S. in 2005, SoftLayer was acquired by IBM last year in order to
strengthen the larger company’s struggling cloud computing business. SoftLayer offers
cloud computing services from seven global data centers, only one of which is in Europe
(Amsterdam). Widely known for its high-performance “bare metal” offering, SoftLayer
also offers more traditional virtual machines.
Since being acquired by IBM, SoftLayer’s cloud computing solutions have expanded
beyond their traditional markets amongst startups and medium-sized businesses. IBM’s
enterprise client base is also now being sold SoftLayer’s solutions, backed by IBM’s
established sales and professional services operations. IBM recently announced a
$1.2-billion investment in its cloud business, including the construction of data centers in
a further 13 countries (including the UK). There are also indications that IBM – with
SoftLayer – will move to more closely and explicitly embrace OpenStack. As the fruits of
this effort begin to reach the market, the company’s score for our interoperability vector
would, most likely, rise.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
Outlook and predictions
The cloud market in Europe, as elsewhere, continues to grow despite short-term concerns
around security and hacking. For some groups of customers (particularly those concerned
with the most valuable personally identifiable information), U.S.-headquartered cloud
providers have always been a cause for concern. Neither last year’s revelations nor the
active steps these companies are taking to reassure customers are likely to have much
impact upon this most conservative group. Instead, they are inclined to rely upon Europewide providers or – more likely – national offerings within their own country.
For the bulk of cloud computing use cases, even in Europe, there are no legal barriers to
using any of the providers considered in this report. Other considerations also affect the
choice of cloud infrastructure, as illustrated by Amazon’s sharing of the top score with
Europe’s Interoute. Amazon and its peers are compelling to one group of prospective
customers, and Interoute will appeal just as strongly to a very different demographic.
None of the providers assessed in this report represent a bad choice for companies
seeking to operate within Europe, as the relatively high – and similar – scores suggest.
Equally, none of them are an excellent choice for the wide range of potential use cases
explored; none score higher than 3.8 out of 5.0.
Customers seeking a cloud provider will need to review the relative importance of each
of our disruption vectors to their particular circumstance and use case. In the right
circumstances, any of the cloud providers considered here could prove a cost-effective
and strategic choice — or an inappropriate mistake.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
About Paul Miller
Paul Miller is an analyst and consultant based in the East Yorkshire (UK) market town of
Beverley and working with clients worldwide. He helps clients understand the
opportunities (and pitfalls) around cloud computing, big data, and open data, as well as
presenting, podcasting, and writing for a number of industry channels. His background
includes public policy and standards roles, several years in senior management at a UK
software company and a PhD in Archaeology.
Miller was the curator for GigaOM Research’s Infrastructure/Cloud Computing channel
during 2011, routinely acts as moderator for Gigaom Research webinars, and is author of
a growing body of Gigaom Research papers.
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market
About Gigaom Research
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Sector RoadMap: the European cloud infrastructure market

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