Proliferation of Cloud Service Providers Leads to a Better Service

The recent increase in the number of companies offering cloud services has been exponential. The cloud computing market has experienced high growth in recent years, leading to an increase in the number of cloud services providers, and some have seen this as a bad thing for the industry. Opponents claim that the increase has not been tied to any improvement in actual service delivery to the end user. However, a simple analysis of the cloud market is sufficient to show that the cloud server hosting as a service is improving.

First, cost of cloud server hosting has been on the decline in recent years. Cost is a decisive factor where services are being offered as a business model. The increase in the number of providers has led to increased efforts to reduce costs. The costs attached to cloud computing stem from hardware requirements. The cost of acquisition, installation, integration, and energy for these server systems is consistently decreasing. This has been fueled by increased research and development of systems that are more energy efficient and cost effective.

Secondly, the development of cloud computing platforms, while done in isolation, has acted to improve service delivery. This is because, though the systems are being developed in proprietary environments, there is convergent evolution. Every developer, while seeking to produce the platforms that become an industry standard, is shaping the industry standard. An analysis of the development trend shows that increased research input into these platforms even though done in isolation is complimentary. The platform developers are using their own proprietary technology in development; still they are targeting the same market while using similar hardware.

Thirdly, increased competition between cloud services providers has led to product stability and reliability. Because no single service provider has a monopoly on the market, each has to strive to ensure that his or her services are exemplary. Cloud computing is based on virtualization of services and products to be accessed through a network platform such as the internet. This initially faced challenges such as network access reliability for the end user. Coupled with other problems like service disruptions and failures, the cloud market has been forced to evolve. This has led to such advancements as offline access of cloud hosted data through the use of hybrid storage capacities. Furthermore, the new range of API created applications has been designed to factor in service unavailability in ensuring continuous performance.