Most enterprises and companies when building cloud solutions focus on the “Big-3” cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Although, many companies that pay for these cloud services do not require services like computer vision, super-advanced networking, speech recognition etc.
Majority of the enterprises and new startups are not working on AI training or quantum computing workloads on the cloud. Most of these businesses require basic core cloud services like compute, object storage, backup and failover, or hybrid cloud. Technology analysts are recommending alternatives to the “Big-3” cloud providers that offer arguably the same scalability and infrastructure for most enterprise workloads at lower costs.
Oracle Cloud
Oracle Corporation’s Cloud Services offers their Oracle Cloud SaaS and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The cloud service delivers infrastructure technologies as-a-service with storage, computation, and networking services. Large enterprises have relied on Oracle’s cloud services for a decade now because of the breadth of their cloud service.
Amazon also relied on Oracle cloud for its retail operations till 2018. Oracle’s cloud has been working in 38 regions and 46 availability zones in operation and has been the backbone of various enterprises when it comes to cloud computing.
IBM Cloud
IBM spent several years building a large cloud computing infrastructure other than other legacy technologies for which it is known. In 2021, the company offered its managed infrastructure services business to Kyndryl.
New availability zones have been added to its server for the past few years and Kyndryl also established strategic relationships with Azure and Google Cloud.
Though the company lagged behind the “Big-3” in the race to cloud computing, today IBM offers all of the cloud services that an enterprise would need including Iaas, PaaS and DevOps. IBM has been investing heavily in DevOps services by integrating its cloud offerings with delivery pipelines and now matches Microsoft’s Azure in the service.
Digital Ocean
Founded in 2011, DigitalOcean, is a cloud service provider that offers on-demand infrastructure and platforms for smaller developers, startups, and businesses. Today, it delivers its software solutions to 620,000 customers in 185 countries.
The IaaS provider platform did not receive enough attention because it did not have support for Microsoft’s Windows-based machines. On the other hand, users of Linux or any other open source operating system found the cloud service easy and conveniently scalable.
Alibaba
The China-based ecommerce company, Alibaba, also offers cloud computing services. Being based in Asia, Alibaba Cloud has a large user base and is therefore the fourth largest cloud provider. Compared to the nine AWS regions in Asia, Alibaba offers 15 regions.
Alibaba Cloud offers elastic computing, database, network visualization, storage, security, large-scale computing, and machine learning which are some of the most required enterprise required solutions.
Tencent Cloud
After Alibaba Cloud, Tencent is the second largest cloud service provider in China. Providing services in 21 regions and 65 availability zones in operations, the cloud service offers services in China, US, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Brazil.
Tencent Cloud offers low maintenance and unique C2B offerings for international businesses like IaaS, SaaS, and a package of GTM solutions.
OVHcloud
A Europe-focused cloud service provider, OVHcloud, offers solutions including public cloud, web cloud services, hosted private cloud, and bare metal. With countries like France, Germany, US, Canada, Poland, UK, and Singapore, the company is also expanding to other regions with 400,000 physical servers currently running.
OVHcloud offers web and cloud services to 1.6 million customers worldwide and offers services at a very competitive price—making it appealing to new enterprises.
Linode (Akamai)
In 2022, Akamai Technologies acquired Linode for $900 million to build its own cloud hosting service. Linode’s IaaS platform currently is serving one million customers worldwide. With its low-price model, the company focuses on startups and new enterprises.
Akamai Technologies is a content delivery network and security solutions provider. Apple is also using Akamai for its Private Relay service after requests from customers to expand computing services.
Conclusion
Dozens of cloud computing services are available for individual developers and startups that can be used at lower prices and offer the same amount of scalability required to run core tasks of an enterprise.
The “Big-3” cloud services offer the largest scalability, but users are now also finding and shifting to alternative cloud services for lower prices and simpler infrastructure.
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