Cool cloud startups in 2014
Cloud computing is producing a great number of big and successful companies. Bessemer Venture has identified about 300 successful cloud startups – among them, 16 have already hit a $1 billion valuation or on the verge of it.
Startups are showing up every day in the cloud market, from optimizing infrastructure services to offering development platforms. There are applications served from the cloud and new classes of apps that could not have been made without the cloud. So let’s take a look at some cool innovative cloud startups that are changing the game this year:
- CloudPhysics – uses big data to protect the cloud. The startup, founded in 2011 in Mountain View, California, by former VMware employees, offers a cloud-based service that gathers billions of samples of anonymized operational data each day from customers around the globe. That information is dissected to identify potential problems on virtual server, storage and networking environments, reducing human errors that can damage a data center.
- Piston Cloud – with all the interest these days in OpenStack, we sometimes forget how difficult it can be to deploy and manage an OpenStack cloud. The San Francisco-based startup uses advanced systems intelligence to orchestrate private cloud environments on nothing but commodity hardware. The software simplifies the process to the point that a single system administrator using Piston Cloud’s Piston OpenStack 3.0 release can alone operate an OpenStack-powered private cloud.
- CoreOS –in an age of distributed computing clusters, the lightweight Linux distribution is optimized for massive server deployments. This year, CoreOS became available on Google’s Compute Engine cloud, released an enterprise-grade version and launched a service called Managed Linux that its developers describe as the world’s first OS-as-a-Service. CoreOS fully integrates Docker for deploying and managing Linux containers, and many believe this technology is the future of virtualization in enterprise environments.
- ElasticHosts – offers a public cloud that comes closer than anyone else, including AWS, to billing customers only for the computing resources they are using. The London-based company takes the consumption-based pricing model a step further than its competitors, dividing usage into 15 minute intervals, and it has the potential to deliver significant cost savings to businesses.
- Netskope – provides discovery, analysis and policy enforcement for over 2,600 cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps. The startup can help CIOs get a handle on Shadow IT by bringing visibility to the great number of apps brought into businesses without IT oversight, and introducing good governance to their management.
An increasing number of startups and small businesses are moving key operations to the cloud. In this era of everything as a service, cloud startups are also forcing existing businesses to up their games and go cloud. What’s your plan?
