Amazon narrowly tops Microsoft as king of the cloud

As we fasten our seatbelts and take off for the cloud, we must be mindful of who’s flying the plane. That’s the message from a study to be released today by Nasuni Corp., which concludes that only six of the leading 16 cloud storage providers are ready for primetime.

Since April 2009, Nasuni has been evaluating the market, testing storage vendors for performance, stability and scalability. The top performers were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, the study found. The other services to pass the test were from AT&T, Nirvanix, Peer 1 Hosting and Rackspace.

Which 10 failed? Nasuni spared those names, and for good reason. It wants them to get better, not go away. The Natick, Massachusetts-based startup provides storage technology and services built on top of existing cloud infrastructure. So the more providers in the market the better the competition and the more prices likely fall for Nasuni, which buys cloud storage and bundles in its proprietary technology to then sell to customers.

BusinessWeek has the details HERE!