An overview of the cloud services your business could choose and what they have to offer
Key Takeaways:
- Amazon Web Services offers a diverse range of cloud products that are widely used and have the largest market share
- Other cloud services — such as Azure and Google Cloud — have gained market share recently but still lag behind AWS
- All cloud services come with their pros, cons, and unique features
- Various companies offering cloud have their own products with individual pricing, so your selection has to be made according to specific business needs
If you are currently planning to shift to the cloud, be assured that it’s a wise move. Cloud computing offers many benefits for businesses, from cost reduction to higher efficiency, more flexibility, and improved security — the cloud has got it all covered.
The next question is about choosing the right cloud service. There are several worth considering, and not all of them offer the same features and benefits. Certain services are better for specific use cases.
Here is an overview of AWS, Azure, and Google cloud and why businesses might choose each of them for their cloud computing needs.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a broadly used cloud platform rolling out over 200 services with pay-as-you-go offerings. AWS provides secure cloud services such as database storage, computing power, content delivery, and many other functions.
AWS was launched in 2006 and currently has a 31% share of the global computing market. Amazon was one of the first to offer IT infrastructure services as web services, which came to be known as cloud computing. It is seen as a leader as far as the global cloud infrastructure service industry — valued at around $70 billion — is concerned.
AWS prides itself in providing the most reliable, inexpensive, and scalable cloud services to businesses operating in 190 countries around the world. It markets itself as the most secure cloud service with the most functionality and most proven operational expertise. It also claims to have the fastest pace of innovation.
AWS has the largest community of customers and partners. Its customers are spread across all industries, including public sector organizations, enterprises, and startups. The AWS partner network (APN) consists of thousands of AWS services specialists and tens of thousands of independent software vendors who develop technologies that work on AWS. CloudHesive is both an Amazon Premier Partner and Amazon Managed Services Partner.
Pros and cons of the AWS Cloud
The advantages of AWS cloud services are plenty. It allows you to scale your storage according to the particular needs of your organization. It also offers several operating systems, programming languages, and databases to meet different client needs.
With AWS, there is high transfer stability and minimal information loss is expected during server and storage transfer. AWS also offers disaster recovery services.
AWS has better DevOps support, better business intelligence and analytics tools, and a much simpler licensing method. It is also cost-effective — you only pay for what you use.
The con is the presence of too many products, which makes the selection process tough. It also demands some level of technological awareness to be able to run its services.
Azure
Azure is an open-source cloud platform offered by Microsoft. It is a flexible platform that offers development, service management, service hosting, and data storage.
Azure was launched in 2010 and has garnered an 11% share of the worldwide computing market.
Pros and cons of the Azure cloud
Azure offers complete support for Microsoft legacy applications. It has better hybrid cloud support, which enables organizations to integrate onsite servers with cloud instances. It has inbuilt tools such as Azure Stack that help organizations deliver Azure services from their own data centers.
Azure is startup-friendly and claims to have high performance. It offers easy one-click migrations in many cases and provides support for mixed Windows/Linux environments.
As far as the cons are concerned, you will have to be ready to pay extra charges for paying as you go. You can also expect Azure cloud services to have glitches, and fixing them demands extra investment.
Azure doesn’t offer any long-term data archiving and retrieval options.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud uses the Google infrastructure and offers intelligent, flexible, and secure cloud services. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was launched in 2011.
Pros and cons with Google Cloud
Google Cloud constantly strives to include more Language and Operating Systems. It has broad network access and a better UI that helps improve the user experience.
Google Cloud has resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and offers powerful data analytics tools. It also offers an on-demand self-service, instance, and payment configuration. All in all, GCP can be surprisingly cost-efficient with long-term discounts.
GCP gives clients a serverless environment with the main focus on microservices architecture. It offers backup services and higher productivity via rapid access to innovation.
The disadvantage with Google Cloud is lesser features compared to AWS. It also doesn’t offer disaster recovery. Moreover, it has small components that are difficult to initialize, and once you move beyond the free tier, there are no offerings without charges.
Making your cloud platform choice
These prominent cloud services come with their own individual features. A thorough cost and benefit analysis will have to be done to make the choice that’s right for the specific needs of your business. The goal at the end of the day is to power-up the functioning of your organization and optimize all revenue generation processes.
AWS can be an easy choice not only because it is the market leader but also because it offers enhanced reliability and features.
All you have to do to start your journey with AWS is to make an account with them, which comes with 750 hours of free usage per month for the initial year. You can acclimatize yourself to what AWS has to offer by using the free account and tuning into their online conferences and instructional courses
CloudHesive is an Amazon Managed Service Partner organization that can help with your cloud-based business transformation. For a detailed cloud consultation, contact us today.
