Google Beat AWS In Response To Meltdown, Spectre

And Microsoft too, for that matter. The Meltdown and Spectre fiasco that engulfed the technology industry at the start of the year drew varying responses from companies.

Most moved quickly to mitigate the effects when the exploits first hit, but some put up a better show.

The hardware vulnerabilities had laid dormant at the heart of all operating systems up until they were discovered, but the cloud market was hit the hardest when the patches started rolling. Users reported notably slower performances for their workloads after deployment, among other issues.

Nevertheless, Amazon Web Services, while confirming the performance impact, said that it was actively working to minimize the hit.

However, as this survey revealed, Google received the highest score on how it responded to the widespread Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

Which should come as no surprise, as the search engine giant has always been very mindful of security. Not only does it actually help other companies by reporting vulnerabilities in their products and platforms, it also moves quickly to fix issues with its own.

The survey of 190 members of the CRN Channel Intelligence Council had Google receive the highest overall ranking among cloud providers with 17% of respondents saying it had an excellent response, while 27% ranked it as good.

Microsoft Azure, by comparison, received an excellent ranking by 13%, while 27% said it was good.

Amazon Web Services followed in third place, ranking excellent by only 8% of the respondents, and good by another 17%.

The scale was one to five, with the top marks being excellent.

At the end of the day, dozens of IT companies collaborated to keep the bugs secret and hidden away long enough for industry vendors to respond with updates to their operating systems and product platforms.

We are not yet in the clear, but the situation is much better than what was in January.