We have all seen the emerging trend with many Corporates and enterprises of moving from an on-site presence to a public cloud configuration. Although one cannot deny that some type of on-site presence or infrastructure is needed, most of the development is being moved to the cloud. By implementing this strategy, enterprises have an existing physical infrastructure that would be constantly managed and maintained. This will essentially enable us to allocate more time and resources into the development phase at hand.

 This growing trend has cascaded into there being a huge demand for certified cloud developers and architects today. With so many offerings in the market such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, it is no doubt that anyone looking to move into the cloud environment would be hit with the question of “Which one should I choose and which one is the best for my enterprise”. Coming to the three major players in this space, each of them do have a particular set of features and advantages that they offer. AWS has currently taken the cake on being the most widely implemented cloud service today. Therefore, getting an AWS training can be immensely helpful by today’s market stats. DevOps has also seen a corresponding rise as seen with Cloud solutions this is primarily because both of them appear as two sides of the same coin. Thereby, getting trained in AWS can also aid while one is pursuing the best DevOps Certification available as well.

So, let’s go ahead and see how these different cloud providers compete against each other. The first undoubtedly is Amazon’s AWS. It was released 13 years ago in 2006, whereas we have Microsoft’s own offering coming into existence around 7 years ago and lastly, we have Google cloud which was released around 6 years ago. The first to the market advantage that AWS has enjoyed has been clearly shown in its revenue stream and adoption ratio of around 62% beating Google Cloud and Azure drastically with 12% and 20% respectively.  

So how exactly are these offerings changing the way businesses work?

 Statistics show that around 41% of all the considered enterprises and organizations are thinking of moving to the cloud. This trend is at an even faster pace when we talk about the Giants in the Tech space today. So, let’s look at some of the reasons why they are moving to the cloud.

Improvements in operations and scaling: One of the forefront advantages of using the cloud is its flexibility and scaling. Gone are the days where one would require a locally hosted server set which included a host of expensive and large servers. If an organization were to implement the cloud services for the same, the company would then be able to alter the usage and storage needs directly with the cloud provider rather than making changes to the physical infrastructure. This flexibility of increasing the storage needs would be relatively easy as only the pricing structure would be different. In this sense if an organization needs more storage all they would have to do is to subscribe to a higher package and vice versa.

Flexible Workspace: Moving to the cloud not only helps the organization but also helps the employees of that organization. This would allow employees to work from home a lot more as it is possible that all the infrastructure would be hosted on the cloud. This would enable us to have a virtual workspace wherever we would so please. This is primarily why the whole aspect of bring your own device (BTOD) has taken off today. Hosting all of your workspaces on the cloud would help employees from ends of the world to work in accordance with the organization as the location issue would be redundant.

Save on the infrastructure costs: Adding to the above point about the flexible workspace, it is no doubt that the lesser the need to have a physical infrastructure the better the cost savings. This is a growing trend that we have seen primarily with startups as it offers a great deal of functional flexibility all the while providing drastic cost savings. The cost of infrastructure can be spread across all the players connecting through the cloud service. Another prominent advantage of the using the cloud would be the seamless integration with the APIs. Therefore, a company can just as easily integrate its accounting software with a CRM software. This is primarily important for SAAS companies which highlight the integration as a must have attribute. This would enable the organization to start up with the most basic of the cloud offering and then scale up as the need grows.

Storing the Data Securely: This trend of adoption of the cloud has also had a positive impact on the storage and security aspect of the data. Statistics have shown that companies who are invested in the cloud are less concerned regarding security as it would primarily be the task of the cloud provider to ensure the data is secure. These freed up resources and manpower can be better utilized in the optimization and development of the task at hand. Employing a cloud service also alleviates the need to have a local repository which can ease on the maintenance cost and physical storage space. With this we would have an ever-present single repository for all the data with a minimal downtime. More startups and its counterparts have been seen moving to the cloud specifically for this reason.

So how do the different cloud services compare against each other and which one is possibly the right solution for you? Let’s look at this from the point of Computing, Storage, location and coverage as well.

In terms of Computing: It is perhaps the most important aspect of a system in question. Comparing, AWS EC2 instance gives us the core services that have to be configured by the VM with the AMI and this may indeed be custom or pre-defined. Coming to Azure, it essentially provides a Virtual Hard disk (VHD) which is very similar to the AMI configuration on the VM on the AWS counterpart. On the other hand, Google uses the its own proprietary Google Compute engine for the same.

Coming to Storage: AWS with no doubt takes the top spot due to its Simple Storage service or S3 in short. This is essentially the reason it boasts of such a large array of documentation which also includes a host of libraries, sample codes and articles as well as many tutorials about the same. Google cloud and Azure although are usable doesn’t meet up to the services and the features that AWS boasts about.

In terms of Location and Coverage: When we talk about accessibility and deployment of your application, we have to consider the fact of location with prime importance. Location and Pricing are two sides of the same coin. In this accord, the pricing schemes will differ from the region to region for each of these offerings we see today. As expected, Amazon’s AWS takes the first place for the most regions it is servicing with around 43 active zones currently. Azure and Google both trailing behind but not far off with Azure servicing 32 zones and Google dealing with around 32 Countries.

 To summarize, the cloud has become an ever-increasing platform that is aimed at providing a continuous solutions and services of various levels to every industry today. By hosting the services on the cloud with their hardware and networks, the providers enable flexibility, cost reduction, modularity and streamlining of the business prospects at hand. Faster and more portable cloud solutions are expected to take over almost all aspects of the business industry. It has already seen a widescale adoption in the fields of healthcare, education, social media and even entertainment. We can therefore pretty confidently say that the Cloud has become a critical part for almost all business operations today.

Author Bio: Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing and have a passion for technology. She has successfully managed and run personal technology magazines and websites. She is based out of Bangalore and has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing and blogging. Her work has been published on various sites related to Hadoop, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and more.