10 Cloud Startups Worth Your Attention
If your view of the cloud marketplace is dominated by the Amazons and Googles of the world, you may be missing out on solutions that better target your needs. Here's our list of 10 up-and-coming cloud providers worth a look.
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When someone mentions cloud computing vendors and service providers, most of us instinctively think about companies like Cisco Systems, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. After all, these are the companies that build and serve a substantial portion of the overall cloud computing market.
But there are many small and nimble cloud startups looking to carve out their own niches, and among them is where you'll find the most excitement and innovation.
According to Gartner Research, the public cloud services market is expected to grow 16.5%, to $204 billion worldwide in 2016 from $174 billion in 2015. And because of these terrific growth predictions, tech companies and providers are constantly trying to offer new or improved services to differentiate themselves from the competition.
This is where smaller startups tend to shine. While they might not have the deep pockets of their larger competitors, they have the agility to seek out new cloud innovations and ultimately go to market with a new solution in a much shorter timeframe.
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There are also a decent number of enterprises that simply don't fit well with the standard, cookie-cutter options that commodity cloud providers offer. Instead, some businesses demand a more targeted and tailor-made cloud service. For some, this may be a cloud environment that makes it easier to manage multiple clouds and to import/export applications and data using automated services. For others, it might be a specific security tool that will largely manage itself within the cloud. Still others might want to achieve the cloud's scalability, flexibility, and auto provisioning of resources -- but within their own private cloud.
Here, we list the hottest cloud startups plus some relatively new entries to the cloud market from longstanding tech companies. Each comes with its own unique angle to a specific service -- one that might be exactly what you're looking for.
We invite you to take a look at the cloud up-and-comers we've chosen. Once you've reviewed our list, tell us in the comments section below which of these companies you find most interesting, and why.
If your business relies heavily on Internet-facing content, you want to be absolutely sure your applications and data are performing optimally. One of the offerings from ThousandEyes is a cloud-based service that can track application performance from more than 100 locations around the world.
According to Infinite IO, "80% or more of all data is written once and never accessed again." Even so, more companies are holding onto ever-increasing amounts of information, so Infinite IO has come up with a way to store massive amounts of data in the cloud at a fraction of the price of its competitors. This model lets you free up your more expensive private storage for data you access regularly.
ProtectWise has a cloud security offering that it refers to as a "network DVR." Basically, the service will record and transmit all your network traffic to the ProtectWise cloud service. Once there, a number of security checks are performed on the data, including deep-packet inspection and correlated analysis. But even more important, you can store all this network data for months. This gives security administrators the ability to perform analyses to catch and resolve breaches that would have otherwise gone undetected.
If you're looking to build out your own private cloud with a public cloud feel, you should check out CloudBolt. The CloudBolt software can convert your private infrastructure into an enterprise-class IaaS or PaaS environment. This gives you the same fast provisioning, management, and scalability tools that are seen in public offerings.
Another hot startup in the world of private cloud architectures is Springpath. The company's software-only approach to private cloud services is a cost-effective path to achieving hyperconvergence scale and management typically found only in public cloud offerings.
Veracode is a 10-year-old security company that's showing businesses why the traditional, on-premises approach to application security testing is not as effective as cloud-based AST services. If you're one of the growing number of companies that wants to be able to check security vulnerabilities in applications, Veracode should be on your short list.
If you're looking to manage and control your cloud and bare-metal servers with a single platform, CoreOS might be the perfect match. CoreOS utilizes Linux containers to manage applications and services across your own private data center as well as in the cloud. One key benefit of CoreOS is its ability to auto-update one server operating system while automatically providing fault tolerance by shifting processes to other servers. The CoreOS updates are offered on-premises or as a SaaS model, which makes perfect sense for those who don't want to deal with manually updating their Linux operating systems. You simply containerize the apps you want to run and CoreOS takes care of the rest.
Ravello Systems, which Oracle purchased earlier this year, created a distributed hypervisor architecture called HVX, which is offered as SaaS. HVX can encapsulate a multi-VM application into a single package. This gives the application the extraordinary ability to be imported onto any cloud environment and run without modification.
Zscaler is quickly becoming one of the most popular cloud security vendors around. The company's Zscaler platform uses a SaaS model to protect organizations from threats coming to or from the Internet, as well as public and hybrid clouds.
Platform9 is a private cloud service that is revolutionizing how private infrastructures are deployed and managed. The platform is based on OpenStack and enables you to run many popular platforms, such as VMware, Docker, and KVM. Once it's set up, you get all the benefits of a self-provisioning data center -- but one you can call your very own.
As you can see, a number of companies are bringing fresh and new things to the world of cloud computing. In fact, much true innovation in the cloud market is happening in startups, thanks to the amount of venture capital floating around. And because the cloud market is growing at such a healthy rate, we can expect more startups -- and more innovation in the cloud space -- for a long time to come.
As you can see, a number of companies are bringing fresh and new things to the world of cloud computing. In fact, much true innovation in the cloud market is happening in startups, thanks to the amount of venture capital floating around. And because the cloud market is growing at such a healthy rate, we can expect more startups -- and more innovation in the cloud space -- for a long time to come.
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