The first week of April 2018 has been a big one for the Cloud. New announcements and products from Alibaba, AWS, and Google Cloud have influenced their standing in the cloud market.
Alibaba Approves Cappasity for Create@Alibaba Cloud
Chinese cloud giant Alibaba has approved Cappasity for its Create@Alibaba Cloud program. The program focuses on enabling startups to take advantage of benefits such as free cloud usage, marketing assistance, introductions to investors in the Chinese market, access to workshops and other offline events, and the potential of being promoted by Alibaba Cloud through co-branding opportunities and being featured on its website.
Cappasity is a cloud-based platform that gives businesses a method to create and embed 3D content into their websites, mobile apps, and virtual reality or augmented reality applications. It’s a technique used widely in e-commerce websites to display 360-degree views of products that shoppers can interact with.
While we are not currently featuring Alibaba Cloud in the Liftr Index, we are tracking its activity and noted an uptick in customer sentiment following this announcement. Stay tuned for more information about Alibaba Cloud and the Liftr Index over the next several weeks.
AWS Launches S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
AWS has added a new lower-cost tier to its popular S3 storage service that targets businesses and teams that don’t require frequent access to their stored data. S3 One Zone-IA is a lower-priced offering that sits apart from S3 Standard and Standard-IA plans in that data is stored on a single availability zone rather than being replicated across several zones.
The result is a difference in promised availability from 99.9% on Standard to 99.5% on One Zone. This difference in availability translates to a day or two each year where data may not be accessible due to downtime of the individual zone. Data is also not resilient in the event that the hosting data center is destroyed by events such as a natural disaster, fire, flood, or technical issue.
AWS is promoting this option as a secondary backup service rather than a primary storage solution for businesses.
Google Cloud Adds Nine New Compliances to Service
Google Cloud has added nine new compliance standards to its service, bringing the total listed certifications to 30. Standards and regulatory compliance, as well as industry certifications are an important factor for cloud services as they enable businesses to determine whether or not a cloud solution will meet the strict compliance standards of the regions and industries in which they operate.
Google Cloud lists certifications with HIPAA, ISO, AICPA, and compliance with regional legal frameworks such as GDPR and Privacy Shield.
The increase in listed compliances resulted in a 5.84% jump in Google Cloud’s overall Liftr Index score with its security rating increasing by over 42%.
The LIFTR Index is constantly updated with the latest data surrounding the cloud industry. Often, this data reflects a progression among the top cloud providers toward a more secure and reliable cloud. As the technology evolves, the race to the top continues.
One thing is for certain: the winners of this race are the customers of these cloud providers.
