IBM Cloud is one of the most popular cloud services around. It had been around for quite a while and had made an impact in the business world since inception. One of the factors that promote this brand and registers it on the minds of all and sundry is the flexibility of the services and the packages. There is the Lite Package that is offered free to all, but has a limited cloud storage space of 256MB; there is the Pay-as-you-go plan that offers something higher, but charges you as you use it; there is also the third and final plan that involves subscription with a fixed price. It is left for you to decide on what works best for you.
You can go for the free plan to get your feet wet and use that to decide if the IBM Cloud Services worth it or not. Then you can upgrade your plan any time you like. What is more, you can change from one plan to another without much ado any time you feel like. You can equally cancel the plan if you so desire; no string attached.
This high level of flexibility is rarely seen in several other similar services out there today. However, it is not the only thing that sets IBM Cloud Services apart from others.
How it all started
IBM bought SoftLayer in 2013; SoftLayer is a public cloud platform and it served as the foundation for the IaaS offering by IBM. The SoftLayer brand was rolled under the Bluemix brand in 2016 and this gives the end users access to both PaaS and IaaS resources from a single console. The company then decided to rebrand its entire cloud portfolio in October of 2017 and renamed it IBM Cloud. It has grown in leaps and bounds since then. Though, it is not among the earliest cloud services, but it has made a name for itself as being among the most reliable. The brand name, IBM, is undoubtedly a sign of quality on its own and thins gives end users a complete confidence in the capability of the IBM Cloud Services to serve their interests in the most professional manner imaginable.
Competition
IBM Cloud Services connote quality as earlier discussed and it has stood its ground against waves of competition. The brand had also successfully remained strong and has stood a head taller than several competitors. Its main competitors in the cloud computing industry are:
- Google Cloud Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- Amazon Web Services
One of the many factors that stand IBM Cloud out from these other competitors is the flexibility of its service. What is more, you can start with the free version to test its reliability before going for any of the paid versions if you like the experience you got from the free Lite Package.
