Who Do You Think is the Best Cloud Provider?

Amazon Still Rules Cloud Rankings, But Competitors Are Catching Up

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first public cloud company and makes up nearly half of the entire market share of all public cloud companies.

AWS has been the perfect choice for businesses that don’t want to spend time and money running their own data centers, turning to AWS for storage solutions. And why not? The company has been around for 11 years!

But the $14 billion company isn’t immune to a bit of healthy competition. While AWS ranks first - by The Gartner Report - for its strategic vision and excellent service, it has been known to have a steep learning curve regarding its software. AWS has also had issues with a confusing billing system, and many users prefer going through a third-party provider to get more details on their bill.

This is where other major players come in - growing faster than AWS and having some advantages that AWS does not.

Here are the top competitors that are taking a bite out of AWS’ market share:

Microsoft Azure

The second biggest player in the public cloud market is Microsoft Azure, and with good reason. Many businesses already run off Microsoft software, and the transition has been much easier for large enterprises. Azure has an easy-to-use interface and is much more user friendly out-of-the-box.

Of course, Microsoft has been around much longer than Amazon, and with that comes a more experienced and larger channel that Amazon simply can’t compete with. Azure also has a 99.95% service availability - the same dependability as AWS.

Azure’s pricing is much simpler that AWS; however, since Azure rounds up to the nearest hour of use - rather than to the minute for AWS - it can be more expensive.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) rounds out the top three players in the cloud market. The search engine behemoth invested heavily in their cloud platform over the last five years, attracting many start-ups to the service.

GCP has an edge on performance and can handle spikes in traffic, whereas AWS requires services to be scaled manually, causing your site to go down for over 5 minutes. Plus, GCP ranks highest among cloud providers in machine learning capabilities, leveraging business intelligence to analyze and make sense of big data.

But Google isn’t overtaking AWS yet - GCP still lacks some key cloud features. Additionally, they limit the amount of support tickets you can open per organization, so service can be slow.

Alibaba's Aliyun

Alibaba Group’s cloud, Aliyun, barely takes a bite out of the cloud market; however, is experiencing explosive growth since expanding outside of China. In the last two years, they have expanded to 14 data centers across the globe, growing 115% in its last quarter.

While Aliyun has some catching up to do in terms of technology, President Simon Hu has his eye on overtaking Amazon in the next four years. And with Alibaba’s track record of making twice as much as Amazon in the eCommerce realm, it can be a very real possibility.

Who do you think is the best cloud service provider?

?ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jim Barnish is a strategic change leader with over 15 years of global, focused and integrated operations, sales, finance and marketing experience. Over the course of Jim’s career, he has successfully worked with companies undergoing accelerated business development, business process improvement, agile change, change management, digital marketing implementation, strategic brand and operational transformation initiatives. When Jim isn’t hard at work, he enjoys spending his time off on Tampa's Bayshore Drive and local beaches.