CSPs

Top 10 European Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) for IaaS List 2016

ChannelE2E spends plenty of time covering the North America cloud services provider (CSP) market. But what about our growing readership in Europe? Well, we've stumbled onto a deeply detailed research report that identifies and ranks the 10 top public IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers in Europe.

UPDATED May 22, 2017: The Top 10 European CSP List for 2017 Is Here

The 2016 List: Before we get to the actual ranked list, here's some background. Cloud Spectator set out to test 25 of the largest, best-known public CSPs that have data centers in Europe. Amid various hurdles, the company says, it was only able to test 19 of the providers. The resulting report "measures and ranks CSPs using a comprehensive performance and price-performance methodology designed by Cloud Spectator specifically for the purpose of measuring cloud environments."

If you want all of the technical details and deep ranking information you can go buy the 53-page report here. Drill through the report and the following companies ultimately are the top 10 CSPs in Europe.

The Top 10 European CSPs offering IaaS

10. Aruba Cloud: The company offers up this "to good reasons to choose Aruba" list. As of March 2016, the company has three privately owned data centers in Italy and the Czech Republic, and a network of partner data centers in  France, the UK and Germany.

9. ProfitBricks: Aside from the "why ProfitBricks" information, here's info on the the company's EMEA data centers and a company timeline.

8. CloudWatt: A strong proponent of OpenStack (the open source platform), and the company's data center is located in France.

7. vCloud Air: After you learn a bit about vCloud Air, here's a list of vCloud Air data center locations ... including deployments in the UK and Germany.

6. CenturyLink: The U.S. service provider has five CenturyLink data centers in Europe, as of this writing. However, the company as of late 2015 and early 2016 was trying to sell all of its data center infrastructure while continuing to offer the services within.

5. Google Compute: You can find the search giant's data center zones listed here.

4. CloudSigma: The company offers Swiss, European and APAC data centers. The heavy focus is (A) for developers (B) running PaaS and SaaS atop the IaaS infrastructure and (C) big data applications. Founded in 2009 in Switzerland, the company has about 50 employees as of early 2016.

3. City Cloud: Another major OpenStack advocate, you can find "why CityCloud information here" and partner program info here.

2. UpCloud: Introduced to the Finnish market in May 2012, international operations arrived in 2013.

1. 1&1: The company's cloud services are outlined here. Apparently, 1&1 is well known for game server hosting and Mincraft server hosting, in particular. And gamers, as you know, rank among the most demanding online users...

That's the overall list. But scroll down further and you''ll see a chart for how each CSP is ranked when positioned vs. 1&1, according to the report...

Top 10 European Public Cloud Services Providers

Source: Cloud Spectator
Source: Cloud Spectator

Which European CSPs on your radar weren't listed -- and are there any that deserve a closer look? ChannelE2E is all ears.

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.

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