Recently, a number of cloud gateway startups ranging from StorSimple, TwinStrata and Panzura pledged their allegiance to Google’s cloud storage offering to try and diversify the clouds they support.

As of this writing Google has not updated its blog or issued an announcement talking about its cloud storage service, the only way anyone heard any recent noise about it is through the gateway vendors pushing their latest wares.

The cloud gateway startups are pushing Google cloud storage because Amazon just recently cut out the middleman by introducing a cloud gateway of its own. Startups are pushing their own cloud gateway for years. Google, who is known for controlling the entire customer experience, most likely will roll out its own cloud gateway in the near future to have end to end control of the total user experience.

Do you really think Google’s master plan is to allow a cloud middleman to control the Google cloud storage experience? Didn’t think so.

While the cloud gateway startups keep trying to justify and figure out their roles as the “value-add” middlemen of the cloud industry, Google also has some work of its own to do to catch up with Amazon, Microsoft Azure, and Nirvanix, the four other cloud storage services providers with their own technology stacks. Of secondary concern to Google is the OpenStack cloud providers like Rackspace and HP (still in beta) which have enough challenges just trying to get their open source clouds up to enterprise-scale. We predict Google will do just fine competing against a consumer grade cloud like Box.net and a personal cloud like Dropbox with its current cloud storage offering.

Another weak point for Google storage cloud is compliance areas.  Google is not offering a HIPAA compliant cloud storage service, which others just rolled out. With the compliance requirements core to cloud storage, Google needs to shore up its weaknesses in this area too.
As far as global coverage, Google Cloud Storage is limited to only Europe and the U.S. Clouds need to be global for data uploads and accessibility from anywhere so clearly Google needs to step it up in this area. You can’t run a cloud storage service and expect customers in Asia to access a data center in Palo Alto. The bandwidth costs alone would be staggering.

Google’s customer support agreement is not what an Fortune 1000/enterprise customer would expect either: “Our support team actively monitors the forum and we’ll do our best to respond.”
This sounds similar to what EMC’s Joe Tucci said of Amazon’s service agreement last year: “EMC’s Joe Tucci characterizes Amazon’s SLAs as “we’ll do our best but if we fail don’t call us.”

Google also has no private and hybrid clouds and is limited only to its public cloud. With the private cloud storage market projected to be bigger than the public cloud storage market this is a missed opportunity but Google isn’t the kind of company that wants to deploy something in your data centers anyway. As they advertise on their site—store your data in Google’s cloud.

So the stakes are high, Google is now in the game with some gaping holes, the players have all laid out their cards, and the next 12 months promises to be an interesting time to see where everybody lands—or falls—in the cloud.