The cloud is an essential tool in our business landscape, enabling organizations to be more agile, responsive, and efficient while reducing costs. Businesses have been buying into it since its inception, and there is now 1 exabyte of data on the cloud, or 60% of all corporate data.
But with so many different cloud providers on the market, it can take time to know which is right for your business. In this blog, we'll compare the leading public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – to help you make the best decision for your organization.
Businesses worldwide are using digital transformation to keep up with and gain an edge over their competitors. Digital transformation allows businesses to develop new ways to work and achieve more ambitious business models. The result is often higher revenues, boosted efficiency, and improved customer satisfaction.
The cloud facilitates the most ambitious digital transformations because it provides agility and scalability. Cloud users can adapt quickly to changes in their industry and holistically across their entire network with the cloud.
So, which public cloud provider should you choose? Let's take a closer look at each one.
Many businesses move with the tide and shift their systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This cloud computing system is used by scores of businesses, including giants such as BMW Group, Coca-Cola, Epic Games, and Netflix.
They are known for constantly adding new services and features to its platform to keep up with the latest technology trends. There have been two particularly impressive services introduced in recent years:
Many small businesses also choose AWS because of its favourable pricing system. They have no set cost plans but instead use pay-as-you-go. Therefore, your business will only be paying for the services and data it uses rather than having to cover costly subscription fees.
The Advanced Partner program also benefits small businesses. Certified vendors can communicate directly with AWS to gain subsidies for your business' cloud migration.
Google Cloud Platform has proven immensely popular amongst businesses with complex computing requirements. They have made AI and ML development accessible to a range of degrees of specialism with two sofwares. TensorFlow is an open-source software library that makes building and training ML models easy. AutoML Vision is a service that allows technicians to train high-quality custom vision models without having to write any code.
Developers can design their ideal infrastructure from the range of products and services available through Google Cloud. They can mix and match the options available. Once created, the infrastructure is easily managed through a centralised console. The console can direct you to individual projects, resources, errors, shows API requests, and keeps you updated on billing.
Many leading businesses currently use Google Cloud, including PayPal, Home Depot, Twitter, and Deutsche Bank.
Microsoft Azure is a public cloud designed to facilitate hybrid clouds. Its services have been built specifically to integrate with on-premises data centres.
Keeping track of your security within a complex cloud can be challenging. Azure has your back with over 90 compliance offerings to ensure your cloud is always on the right side of the law. Moreover, it invests $1 billion annually to protect its customers' data from cyber attacks.
Azure achieves all this while still achieving popular DevOps integrations. Many customers choose azure to access Jenkins and Github. On the data management side, the Azure SQL Database offers a fully managed relational database service.
The three main selling points for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) are that it facilitates working with huge amounts of data, and it does so securely and affordably.
They have built a platform that constantly remains ahead of the technological curve. A result of a third-party study found that OCI has 2-5 times the performance of AWS or on-premises storage solutions. High cloud performance means that your business can impress customers with the efficiency of your operations.
OCI also keeps ahead of the pack with its security features. These include identity and access management, data encryption, and network security. Your data remains secure when OCI are updating their systems, because their dedicated compliance team ensures that their strict processes are adhered to during the deployment process.
Finally, OCI also offers a more economically viable option than its competitors. They estimate that their standard storage offerings are 95% cheaper than their competitors. They also don't charge for all of their services, such as outbound bandwidths of less than 10TB per month.
Each of these cloud services offers the height of quality, but their features make each cloud more appropriate for certain needs. Before choosing, your business must work out what it needs from a public cloud and compare these needs with each of the providers in this article.
As a general rule, when conducting this research, consider the following:
At 3GI, we are AWS Advanced Partners and Microsoft Azure Gold partners and we have extensive experience with GCP and OCI. If you have any questions regarding cloud providers or want to learn how to best integrate the latest cloud technology, please get in touch.