Cloud platforms and cloud computing in general are concepts that have become a true hit in the 2020s. It seems that the IT industry, as well as other sectors of the economy, can no longer imagine operating optimally without them. The number of cloud solution users is growing, and with them, the number of service providers. Which cloud platform should you choose? When searching for any information about cloud computing, cloud management, or data storage on a virtual server, everyone will certainly encounter the names of the industry’s biggest players at least once. We are, of course, talking about Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Each of these giants has invested in its own advanced cloud infrastructure, which no longer resembles what cloud providers accustomed us to a dozen or so years ago, at the very beginning of this concept’s development. All three services –
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure are extremely extensive ecosystems that offer customers hundreds of services, ensure business security, increase process efficiency, and guarantee virtually infinite scalability. However, these are just three companies. Can anyone else claim to be a popular cloud solution in the face of such powerful competition? Among the leaders, we can also notice well-known industry companies, IBM and Oracle, with products called
IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud. Interestingly, directly behind the big three is another cloud service provider –
Alibaba Cloud, which provides a business profile identical to Amazon’s – it is another marketplace. Why then is a seemingly unknown company achieving such spectacular success in cloud services? Because Alibaba Cloud is currently the most popular cloud service in China.
Despite the high competition in the cloud services market and the growing number of providers of such solutions, the choice is most often limited to one of the three largest companies.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud – which solution will be best for our company? This is an extremely difficult question that, of course, cannot be answered in a single sentence. A synthetic, objective comparison of the services of the three largest players in the cloud market is practically impossible, mainly due to the fact that
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have very unique service offerings. This often means that the choice falls on the provider that offers us a specific functionality. Of course, there are common elements found in the big three’s offerings. The ability to rent VPSs, virtual machines, the ability to rent infinite disk space, an innovative tool for
containerization, and an ecosystem enabling the creation of scalable cloud applications. However, each company separately provides us with a range of other unique services on the market that cannot be found with other providers. If, however, we were to assess which company has the broadest offering, it is worth looking at the statistics of the big three’s market share.
Experts point out that it is the AWS cloud, with a 33% market share, that enjoys the best offering. Second place is Microsoft Azure with a 21% share, while Google Cloud, in third place, has only an 8% share of the cloud solutions market. Choosing a specific cloud service can be a major challenge for a company planning to migrate its digital assets. If we do not have specific needs that are the domain of one company’s offering, it is worth paying attention to other features of cloud platforms that will allow us to make the right decision. First and foremost, the flexibility of a cloud service is the main reason for implementing this technology in so many organizations. Do we need new services right now? Additional data capacity? A virtual machine service? Or perhaps machine learning-based tools that we need to complete just one project?
Every cloud service offers us great flexibility in terms of using its functionality, and this should be the deciding factor for us when choosing a specific offer. Let’s not forget about remote access to the entire cloud infrastructure from anywhere in the world. The idea of cloud services is based on this remote access. This provides great comfort in working in a distributed environment, which significantly influences the reduction of costs and time associated with the implementation of business processes.
In the past, a cloud service in its most basic version offered companies disk space, the capacity of which determined the cost of the monthly fee. Today, the scope of cloud services has grown to an unimaginable level, so the issue of costs has also become slightly complicated. Currently, the largest companies offering cloud services bill customers in a similar way as before – in terms of a monthly subscription.
The final amount of such a subscription, however, depends on many factors, including not only the size of the ecosystem dedicated to a given company but also the number of microservices and tools that the enterprise has at its disposal. Additional costs are associated with the data migration service to the cloud, 24/7 support, or additional security for our data. Therefore, a cloud service should not always be chosen based on price. It is better to analyze your needs, adjust the available offers, and choose those that meet our expectations, and then verify the ratio of quality and quantity of services to the total monthly fee.
Cloud platforms are not without reason enjoying such great interest among enterprises in every industry. What are the advantages of implementing such services in your own business processes?
First and foremost, the reliability and stability of the solution, which is guaranteed by the largest players on the market. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are companies that increasingly rely on cloud services – they not only develop them but also monitor the stability of the technology and provide immediate answers to any questions that arise. The benefits of the cloud also include
huge savings, both in financial resources and time. The company does not have to invest in its own infrastructure – everything is provided by the service provider. It also takes much fewer resources and time to create an application in the cloud, which, unlike monolithic applications, also positively affects the scalability of such a project. Let’s not forget about the maximum security of our assets and the huge potential for developing our own company with the help of services available within the cloud. And what about the disadvantages? Are we able to find any?
First and foremost, a fairly advanced decision-making process when purchasing a service that we do not fully understand. It is natural that not every entrepreneur is an IT specialist and is aware of the potential inherent in the cloud. If we want to use cloud computing services to a limited extent, be careful with any additional functionalities that will significantly affect the total cost of the service and may make the entire investment unprofitable.
