Nine out of ten companies believe that migrating to the cloud (public to private cloud) is critical to digital transformation, revenue growth and competitive advantage. If the “Future of Cloud” study carried out by Deloitte shows that the benefits brought by cloud computing are clear, choosing a public cloud provider is a somewhat more complex operation.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are the most well-known hyperscale cloud service providers, each with their own competitive advantages. AWS is known for its diversity of services and scalability options, while Azure stands out for its better integration with other Microsoft services and its high level of security. GCP, on the other hand, stands out for its advanced data management and machine learning features.
Many organizations with a global footprint consider these three vendors for public cloud migration projects. Does the same logic apply to a Romanian company? Wouldn’t it make more sense to choose a local cloud computing provider that offers a similar level of performance and availability, but with the advantage of proximity and support?
What does Amazon Web Service (AWS) offer?
With 34% of the global cloud services market, Amazon Web Service is the world’s largest cloud computing provider. Launched more than a decade ago, AWS offers more than 237 cloud services, from compute to edge and serverless computing. AWS stands out for its scalability and flexibility, giving customers access to a vast global infrastructure with data centers in key regions of the world. For Amazon customers from Romania, the nearest data center is in Ireland.
Amazon Web Service provides computing services through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides virtualized computing resources, and Amazon S3 for durable and scalable data storage. AWS also offers advanced database solutions, such as Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EBS for networking, and Amazon Lambda for serverless environments. The global AWS network, including Amazon VPC, offers extensive options for connectivity and security.
However, AWS can be complex and difficult for new users to understand due to the large number of services and options available. This complexity can make it difficult to navigate and find exactly what is needed. Some users also report that the pricing structure for certain services can be confusing, which does not provide a transparent projection of costs.
What does Azure Cloud offer?
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud services arm, and like AWS, offers a variety of options, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud models. Azure integrates seamlessly with Microsoft technologies and provides robust support for Windows and Linux-based development environments.
Azure provides compute services through Azure virtual machines and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for managing containers. Azure offers efficient storage solutions including Azure Blob Storage and Azure SQL Database for database management. Azure Active Directory (AD) provides identity and security services. Azure services have global coverage and for Romanian customers they are delivering services from data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland.
Azure has the advantage of allowing the reuse of already existing Microsoft licenses, which means low costs. However, the service offering is as complex as in the case of AWS.
What does Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer?
Google Cloud is a set of cloud computing services offered by Google, which stands out for its innovative approach and offers powerful analytics, machine learning and data storage services. The most relevant services are Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for container management and Compute Engine for compute services. Google Cloud Storage and Bigtable provide advanced storage solutions, and BigQuery provides powerful analytics services. GCP benefits from advanced security provided by Google. GCP does not stand out with a very coherent IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering, which limits access for companies that need simple public cloud services.
AWS versus Azure versus Google
Direct comparison of these three public cloud providers is difficult, as each has its own advantages, but all offer a superior level of performance, coverage and availability. Including many of the public cloud services from AWS, Azure, and Google offerings include similar functionality and capabilities. Obviously, there are differences at the level of market share, technological focus, granularity of services, consumption metering, approach to relations with partners, etc.
Amazon offers 237 individual cloud services, Azure about 200, and Google over 100, noting that for on-demand resources, Amazon allows payment by the second (with a minimum of 60 seconds), while Azure and Google allow payment by the minute .
Coverage is global for all three providers, with differences in the number of data centers and regions. Amazon Web Services has a cloud computing infrastructure that spans 99 Availability Zones, in 31 regions, supported by approximately 100 data centers. Microsoft Azure, however, has a global network of more than 160 data centers in 140 countries, and GCP also offers cloud services through the concept of Regions and Zones, through 135 data centers.
AWS, Azure and GCP all claim 99.99% availability However, by SLA they guarantee 99.5% availability for most services and 99.99% only for critical ones.
In conclusion, it is difficult to do an AWS versus Azure versus Google analysis: AWS is the largest of the providers, with the widest range of services and a very granular pay-as-you-go pricing model. Azure is known for its strong integration with other Microsoft products and its focus on Artificial Intelligence services and Copilot assistants. GCP, on the other hand, focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and data analytics services. All three vendors have strong security features and compliance certifications.
M247, a better alternative?
More options and more services are not automatically an advantage for every consumer. Especially in IT, complexity is more often than not the enemy of reliability and ease of use. Not every company can easily distinguish between the hundreds of public cloud services of the big providers, especially if they need simple solutions to solve specific problems.
With the M247, things are simple and the service offering is intuitive yet comprehensive. The services cover the most common scenarios, from colocation for customers who want to migrate to the Bucharest Data Center with their own IT equipment, to back-up and disaster recovery as a service for those who need remote support in continuity plans operational. We also offer advanced connectivity and security services, depending on the specific objectives of each organization.
An important advantage for M247 is the data center in Bucharest, which ensures Tier 3 availability (99.95%) and extremely low latency for any national customer. If latency is not relevant for email and “office” type applications, business applications that need a quick or real-time response run much better from a data center located in Romania. Being located in Bucharest and storing data at the national level is also an important advantage for complying with regulations in the field of security and confidentiality, GDPR being the most relevant example. Another asset is the free technical support, in Romanian, available 24/7 by email or phone, provided by a team of 40 qualified people.
Hundreds of Romanian companies have chosen to migrate to the M247 public cloud for the level of performance and security offered. Regina Maria Health Network, TotalSoft, Wizrom, RCS Comisionar, Spring pharmacy network, etc., are just a few of them.
Choosing the right public cloud provider depends on each organization’s specific needs and existing technology context. Each vendor brings unique advantages, and a careful evaluation of the technical details is necessary for the cloud migration to ultimately be effective and deliver the expected results.
For any discussion on how you can migrate to the cloud with M247, contact us at office@m247.com.
