Certification paths from Microsoft, Amazon and Google only prove that a person has theoretical knowledge and some technical experience.
These certifications do not give any guarantee of practical experience in the field and real-life cases.
The certification levels of "CloudCertificated" are based on proven and tested skills, as well as expertise in the field with well-defined criteria.
The easy way to understand the difference between these two different certification paths is to compare what you have learned at school and what you know from your work experience.
A company that has achieved a CSP Expert level of certification is a Partner who knows how to do things in practice and not just in theory!
A certified Cloud Solution Provider, also known as a certified CSP, is an expert in Cloud services such as IaaS, Backup, Mail and Web Hosting.
All the level of the CSP certification are based on the years of experience as well as the number of technical and commercial employees that the supplier is able to guarantee to its customers.
The types of certified CSPs are shown below, and with an indication of the characteristics of experience necessary to achieve the different levels available.
IaaS expert: company with proven experience in managing infrastructure servers in the cloud environment.
The level of Experience is determined by the number of Cloud Servers managed and the level of complexity of one or more customers who can, for example, make use of dedicated firewalls, site-to-site VPN, Docker technology or VDI / RDP environments.
Backup expert: a company with proven experience in managing backups in the cloud environment.
The level of experience is determined by the number of managed backups and the type of services offered, based on the experience gained in the areas of cloud backup, Disaster Recovery and Email Archiving.
Mail expert: a company with proven experience in the management of email services in the business environment, where the required needs include features such as sharing calendars, contacts and mail, as well as synchronization on mobile devices.
The level of experience is determined by the number of mailboxes managed, distributed over a large customer base.
Web expert: a company with proven experience in the management of web hosting services, making use of different platforms and technologies.
The level of Experience is determined by the number of web hosting managed and the level of complexity of one or more customers for which advanced configurations have been adopted such as the use of load balancers and clustered databases.