Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud may lead the cloud market, but the drumbeat of the competition is growing louder from niche alternatives and upstart challengers.
Other public providers in the mix include the likes of Alibaba Cloud, Dell Technologies' Virtustream, IBM's Bluemix, Iron Mountain, Oracle and Rackspace. Meanwhile, startup Wasabi Technologies's low-priced cold storage options drew so much interest out of the starting gate, the company temporarily shut down its trial offer. Regional providers include Backblaze, CenturyLink, Joyent and NTT Communications. Managed providers and systems integrators such as Atmosera and Key Information Systems are also promoting the cloud service delivery model. Finally, traditional software vendors are building clouds to exclusively support their particular applications.
When it comes to cloud storage alternatives to the big three in the cloud service delivery model and compute market, there are too many options to mention here. Instead, this article will arm IT professionals with an understanding of how various services deliver viable alternatives to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, the types of providers out there and what to look for from these cloud services.
How to beat the big three Several years ago, many large analyst firms predicted the cloud market would be a three-way battle between Amazon, Microsoft and Google. While these three remain the market share and name recognition leaders, they are by no means alone. The second tier of cloud providers offers very competitive pricing while often delivering better service. From a technology perspective, most of these second-tier cloud providers have storage architectures similar to their larger competitors. They use an object storage model that utilizes commodity hardware and software to deliver capacity storage. While the big three deploy teams of storage developers, second-tier providers typically use off-the-shelf software, which saves on paying teams of doctorates. The big three do buy their hardware at better prices than the tier 2 cloud providers, but the reality is hardware is such a competitive market that the purchase delta between a small and large buyer is relatively small. The first step in selecting the right provider is for a business to assess its cloud skills. From a business model perspective, most second-tier providers focus on a particular capability or product offering. For example, many have developed a reputation in the backup data storage market, while others specialize in archive storage. There are also second-tier cloud providers that specialize in specific industries like healthcare, government or financial markets. Focus and specialization enable them to provide a more white-glove cloud service delivery model, ultimately reducing the time it takes for a customer to move to the cloud.
There are typically three types of second-tier cloud providers. The first type, the purpose-built provider, is usually a software developer that has decided to offer a cloud service delivery model to its customers. Instead of using one of the mega-cloud providers, they build a cloud to suit their specific use. These companies typically believe by controlling all the variables, software and the cloud, they can give customers a better experience and -- more than likely -- better pricing. The most common examples of the purpose-built cloud are the data protection and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) examples. Companies like Acronis, Backblaze, Datto and Unitrends offer either cloud backup or DR. The advantage of that kind of cloud service delivery model is it makes cloud connectivity about as seamless as one can find. The other type of second-tier cloud vendor is the full-service cloud provider. Like the purpose-built provider, these vendors tend to focus on a particular market segment, but support a range of software instead of just one.
