Cloud computing essay

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is one of the world’s leading information technology companies, with operations in over 170 countries with gross equity of $ 18.392 billion as of 2016. Its current clients are companies and individuals that require cloud storage services (Bond 156). Server hardware, cognitive offerings, cloud, applications, storage, and Global Business Services are among the services provided by the company.
Rackspace, on the other hand, provides cloud storage, hosting, application, and professional software, as well as security and compliance. Its current clients are in the mid-market and enterprise. Its equity is valued at more than $1.073 billion. Microsoft is a leading firm in the software, computer hardware, and consumer electronics industry. It offers products such as Office, Xbox, Dynamics, Windows, Servers, and Visual studio among others. It services include One Drive, TechNet, Outlook.com, Windows Update, Azure, LinkedIn, Office 365, and Bing (Prasad 56). The revenue of the firm as of 2016 was $ 85.32 billion while the equity stood at $71.99 billion. The current customers include almost every organization since they require Office, servers, enterprise software, the cloud computing such as Azure, and digital service market which entails the MSN.

The other vendor is Amazon that offers electronic commerce and other cloud computing services. Its size could be reflected by it being the third largest company based on revenue in the Information Technology industry. Its customers can shop online for consumer electronics, retail products, Amazon games, digital content, Amazon art, and video, Drive, and Studies, Amazon Web Services including the Elastic Compute Cloud, home appliances, and business equipment.

Comparison and Contrast of these vendors

The Amazons EC Service Level Agreement governs the utilization of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the Elastic Block Store (EBS). The manner in which the SLA applies to these cloud provisions is different. The SLA adheres to the AWS agreement which ensures that Amazon EC2 and EBS are accessible to clients with monthly uptime percentage of over 99.95% (Prasad 56). Such is the service commitment and it not met, the users are supposed to acquire a Service Credit. It is a dollar credit arrived at by calculating the percentage of total charges incurred by a user for using the cloud software. If the monthly uptime percentage is 99.95% or more, then the service credit rate will be 10%, but if the former is 99%, then the latter is 30%. Rackspace, on the other hand, has an SLA of 100% and the time span is for the current period of use as opposed to Amazons duration that is the preceding year. The credits charged by Rackspace are 5% for about full network access in 30 minutes and 5% for any overtime. The availability of the Rackspace Cloud is just like that of Amazon which is 99.9%. Both firms let customer incur the administrative responsibility that comes with when an outage occurs.

IBM offers the Cognos Disclosure Management on Cloud in conjunction with process automation solution that allows customers to gather data and integrate it with the narrative analysis in a more auditable environment. The SLA of this service is to guarantee about 99.95% availability, and unlike Rackspace and Amazon, IBM does not charge any credits if it does not adhere to the service level goals (Bond 156). However, for a contracted service of 99% - 99.75% the credit is 2%, for those between 95% - 98.99% the credit is 5%, but 95% and below the credit is 10%. Microsoft guarantees for cloud services such as Azure for Office 365 an external connectivity of about 99.95% uptime.

The charges for storage services offered by Amazon depend on the region. For instance, in London for S3 Inventory is about $0.0025 per million objects listed. The data transfer IN to Amazon S3 online in the United States, Japan, and Europe is $0.04/GB. The costs of cloud service offered by IBM includes $0.03 cross region standard for the 0-499.99 TB (Sarma, Prativa and Samarjeet 27). Office 365 is a subscription service from Microsoft that is categorized into Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal, with annual costs of $99.99 and $69.99 respectively.

The Amazons Customer Agreement contains rules that govern a client’s use of the service offerings. For Rackspace, the contractual arrangement, especially for cloud services such as Hosting, entails documents that have the general terms and conditions, the particular product and service requirements, Acceptable Use Policy, and the service description giving the full account of the fees related to what the client is buying (Prasad 56). For Microsoft, its contractual agreement entails terms that define how a user will use the services offered, products and the websites. IBM Corporation has a contractual arrangement that states the apparently the conditions of each service and how the clients should use them to avoid penalties.

IBM may not have a higher chance of comparing with Amazon cloud services because it concentrates on hybrid cloud computing which places it in a smaller market. Amazon is considered the largest cloud provider through its improvements such as the creation of advanced hybrid cloud allowing clients to span their data centers and that of Amazon’s cloud (Sarma, Prativa and Samarjeet 27). Following Amazon closely is Rackspace that uses the OpenStack cloud computing platform and is, therefore, offering alternatives not provided by Amazon. Microsoft introduced SharePoint and Exchange Online, and since it has been aggressive to promote its cloud, it will overpower Amazon in the provision of hybrid cloud powered by Hyper-V virtualization software and Microsoft. From this comparison, Microsoft seems to be winning the cloud computing showdown amongst these other firms and is a recommended vendor also due to its high quality of services.

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Works Cited

Bond, James. The Enterprise Cloud: Best Practices for Transforming Legacy It., 2015. Print.

Prasad, A.V K. Exploring the Convergence of Big Data and the Internet of Things. , 2017. Print.

Sarma, Hiren K. D, Prativa Rai, and Samarjeet Borah. Ccb 2014: Communication, Cloud and Big Data. , 2014. Print.