Gartner: 25 Percent of Cloud Providers Will Disappear By 2015
Roughly one-quarter cloud services providers (CSPs) will disappear from the market by 2015, Gartner predicts. That forecast should trigger alarm signals for VARs trying to determine which CSPs to engage for SaaS, IaaS and PaaS services. Here’s why.
The vast majority of VARs and MSPs have no plans to build their own next-generation data centers to run cloud services. Instead, they will increasingly seek public and private cloud prividers as partners. The challenge: Knowing which CSPs will survive for the long haul as roughly 25 percent of industry players potentially disappear by 2015.
The VAR Guy’s advice: Check out the Top 100 Cloud Services Provider (CSP) list and also take a close look at well-known, publicly held software and infrastructure companies that are now launching cloud services. Some top CSPs will disappear through mergers and acquisitions — but their platforms will march forward. The same goes for many software companies.
As you consider moving customer workloads to a third-party CSP, be sure to ask the following questions:
- How are you financed?
- What’s your debt load and cash burn rate?
- Are you profitable?
- Will you need to raise more money to continue operations. If so, at what point?
- What’s your SLA and how does it ensure that I can move my customer data from your cloud to another cloud at a moment’s notice?
- Where will my customer’s data actually reside and how is it protected?
That’s just a sampling of questions. Don’t stop there. Dig deeper. Mitigate your risks and your customers’ potential exposure to CSPs that could disappear from the market in the next few years.