Following this week’s Structure:Europe conference in London, we’re highlighting three cloud reports recently published on GigaOM Research. Our analysts – based in both the U.S. and across Europe – focus on a variety of aspects of the cloud, from security concerns to storage capacity limitations. This week’s reports include a special focus on the European cloud market, and how recent market trends are especially impacting that ecosystem.
Note: GigaOM Research, previously known as GigaOM Pro, is a subscription-based research service offering in-depth, timely analysis of developing trends and technologies. Visit pro.gigaom.com to learn more about it.
Cloud: The state of Europe’s homegrown cloud market
Rene Buest and Paul Miller
Released in conjunction with this week’s Structure:Europe conference, this report is a collaboration between analysts Rene Buest and Paul Miller, who take a look at the unique circumstances affecting Europe’s cloud market. While the usual global providers – Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Microsoft Azure – all have some dominance in Europe, “a growing number of local companies are developing cloud computing offerings in the European market.” In addition, recent security concerns about U.S. providers, spurred by the PRISM leaks, have brought about the rise of native European cloud providers. Buest and Miller provide an overview of European concerns with international (and especially US) cloud providers, a rationale for developing cloud solutions within Europe, and a look at some of the unique circumstances within Europe – such as an interest in national or regional clouds – that are currently influencing the European market. They also provide profiles of major European cloud providers before sharing key takeaways for the current market climate.
Cloud: Self-service BI: Next-generation analytics for the cloud
Andrew Brust
Analyst Andrew Brust digs into business intelligence (BI) technology, which has been around for more than four decades but has only recently come into wide scale use, as big data tools and analytics software have become more prevalent, more reliable, and easier to use. A key trend is “BI technology that is more compact, more embedded, often cloud-hosted, and used more frequently in a self- service capacity,” eliminating the need for a specialist to identify data sources, set parameters, and create interactive data visualizations. Brust provides an extensive overview of the current BI market, including embedded, self-service BI, cloud BI, and cloud models. He also provides some end user stories to illustrate a variety of use cases, and concludes with his analysis of what the market holds for the near-term future.
Cloud: How object storage tackles thorny “exascale” problems
Mark Staimer
Analyst Mark Staimer takes a look at “exascale problems, which involve more than 1,000 petabytes (PB) or 1 million terabytes (TB) of data” as they impact the storage market. This is an increasing concern especially to enterprise-IT organizations, as data storage growth continues to increase at near-exponential rates. Staimer’s report provides an in-depth overview of exascale problems for IT professionals and IT buyers, and a comparative look at four potential solutions – OpenStack Swift, Ceph, Cleversafe dsNet, and Scality Ring – with rankings and detailed comparisons of service levels.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Report: The Rise of Mobile Health Apps
- Who to watch in the growing European cloud market
- How to move business intelligence beyond the experts