April 24, 2025
Admin
The disruptive impact of cloud computing on the enterprise technology landscape is now well-acknowledged. As digital transformation accelerates, over 90% of organizations leverage cloud platforms in some capacity.
MarketsandMarkets predicts the global cloud computing space will grow from $371 billion in 2022 to $832 billion by 2026. This exponential growth underscores the urgency for enterprises to move away from legacy on-premise models toward cloud-hosted solutions.
This extensive guide will explore what factors are driving enterprises to adopt cloud platforms, enumerate the tangible benefits cloud infrastructure offers, and provide a detailed framework on how organizations should evaluate and shortlist cloud partners aligned to their strategic objectives.
The post also features in-depth overviews of the top 20 cloud service companies that enterprises can engage with for their cloud migration and management needs in 2023 and beyond.
Before we get into the details of what cloud infrastructure means and what it brings, let’s first understand the key reasons why enterprises are moving their legacy systems to the cloud:
Cloud is an OpEx model where you pay only for what you use and not for the hardware and data centers upfront. By having cloud hosted solutions aligned to your usage patterns, you can reduce infrastructure costs big time.
Provisioning new services on cloud is faster than on-premise. The automated self-service and near real-time scalability lets you respond to market trends and customer demands in no time.
Cloud platforms have resilient distributed architecture across global regions and availability zones to give you higher uptime and redundancy. Built-in data backup, replication and disaster recovery mechanisms also minimize downtime risks.
Cloud solutions increase business productivity in many ways – remote access improves employee mobility, easier cross-location collaboration, reduced manual IT maintenance efforts and faster deployment of new tools/apps to augment workflows.
The flexibility and agility of cloud lets you launch new services and products faster to differentiate in competitive markets. The catalog of cloud-native PaaS and SaaS offerings also helps in rapid development.
As most organizations are moving workloads away from on-premise systems to cloud hosted models, choosing the right partner is a big decision.
Before we get into the top cloud companies, let’s first understand what is cloud infrastructure and its components.
Cloud means on-demand delivery of IT resources like compute, storage, networking, analytics, databases and more over the internet. By leveraging the economies of scale from shared cloud provider infrastructure across global data centers, you can get flexibility and consumption based pricing.
Cloud platforms offer 3 types of services:
Additionally, cloud providers offer 3 primary deployment models with varying levels of control, customization, and costs:
Shared resources over public internet, get started quickly with minimal investment and fully managed by provider. But lacks fine grain control and customization.
Eg: AWS, GCP, Azure
Cloud stack is dedicated to an organization, more control and personalization. Good for regulated data compliance, security needs. But more cost and overhead.
Mix of private and public clouds to optimize spending and placement of apps across environments based on security, demand fluctuations etc. But adds management complexity.
As cloud platforms move from just being hosts for IT infrastructure to operating systems for entire businesses, they have grown a lot. Today’s leading providers offer not just core computing, storage and networking but also services around IoT, analytics, blockchain, quantum computing, augmented reality, edge delivery and more.
For organizations, evaluating providers end to end suitability among the many options within the complex and ever evolving cloud landscape is key to long term success.
Here are the key parameters to evaluate:
Check core offerings for compute provisioning, auto-scaling, load balancing, availability, data storage, content delivery, analytics, security, identity access management (IAM), networking, middleware, containers, serverless, blockchain, IoT/Edge services etc.
Also check the provider’s emerging technologies roadmap and new feature release cycles to see if they align with internal digital priorities.
The provider’s mechanisms to simplify workload migration through discovery tools, dependency mapping, automated portability and orchestration layer support need to be evaluated to minimize business disruption and downtime.
Check for data/app portability across cloud environments in case the provider partnership doesn’t work out or their offerings lag the market.
Extensibility options to tailor to your exact needs and DevOps mechanisms for continuous deployments need to be evaluated based on current vs future integration complexity.
Providers have different pricing models around reserved capacity vs used capacity, tiered discounts etc. Businesses need to check the model adaptability to workloads and scope for further savings.
Regulated industries have strict data residency and security protocols to evaluate providers against compliance coverage, auditing transparency, regional data handling policies and responsible AI practices.
Check real world historical reliability benchmarks for the cloud provider for outages, recovery times and service impact to determine infrastructure stability for business critical workloads.
Finally the provider’s support model covering technical troubleshooting, documentation quality, training resources and their SLA for uptime, problem resolution etc. needs to be checked.
While weighing between providers, matching strengths to current and future workload requirements across these parameters is vital.
Additionally, adopting a multi-cloud approach can facilitate further optimizations and risk mitigation by leveraging different providers. With the evaluation of best practices and considerations above as guiding principles, let us examine 20 leading cloud platforms enterprises can consider for meeting their evolving infrastructure needs.
Here are in-depth profiles of the top 20 cloud service providers based on capabilities, adoption, clientele and future roadmap:
TAV Tech Solutions Cross-Cloud services portfolio allows enterprises to run production apps across major public clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, while maintaining operational consistency and visibility, leveraging vSphere virtualization, and NSX security that enterprises trust.
The most dominant IaaS public cloud provider, AWS offers over 200 fully integrated services spanning computing, databases, analytics, machine learning, IoT, security etc. Businesses can leverage automatic provisioning, dynamic scaling, self-repair mechanisms allowing faster innovation at lower TCO.
Microsoft’s extensive IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities make Azure well-suited for developing cloud-native apps, migrating on-premise Windows workloads faster and enhancing collaboration. Azure provides unified identity and access orchestration spanning on-premise and multi-cloud resources.
GCP enables developers to leverage Google’s tested global infrastructure networking for building web-scale apps leveraging data analytics, security, and machine learning services. GCP offers committed uptime SLAs greater than 99.95% for virtual machine instances.
Oracle’s 2nd-gen modern cloud IaaS and PaaS solutions help enterprises migrate or build new cloud-native apps leveraging high-performance infrastructure security capabilities powered by autonomous services.
IBM Cloud helps modernize and scale critical enterprise apps leveraging RedHat OpenShift, containers powered by leading security, and resiliency mechanisms. IBM Cloud Satellite model extends cloud-managed services to on-premise and edge locations.
Alibaba Cloud helps businesses adopt flexible and intelligent solutions for payment, logistics, eCommerce, media processing, and data analytics leveraging big data and machine learning algorithms.
SAP helps migrate complex mission-critical environments like ERP, CRM, HANA etc to public, private, and hybrid clouds through automated discovery, assessment, and remediation tooling for startups to large enterprises.
Salesforce is the undisputed leader in SaaS-based CRM solutions, including sales force automation, marketing, customer service, and analytics suites. Force.com PaaS enables rapid development of custom solutions aligned with business priorities.
ServiceNow offers a leading SaaS-based workflow automation platform catering to ITSM and ESM (Employee Service Management), spanning IT Ops, Employee workflows, and Security practices leveraging mature AI/ML capabilities.
Workday offers a unified SaaS suite covering financial, human capital management (HCM), payroll, procurement, and analytics needs for enterprises seeking a holistic administrative ERP platform.
Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) provides software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, allowing enterprises to seamlessly manage storage, server, virtualization, and networking layers.
Rackspace-managed cloud offerings include expert guidance around infrastructure modernization, security, solutions architecture and optimizations for workloads deployed across data centers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
DigitalOcean’s simplified cloud development platform allows individual developers and SMBs to deploy and scale apps leveraging Droplet compute, managed databases, Spaces object storage, Load Balancers, etc.
Linode public cloud simplifies launching Linux servers and Kubernetes clusters and manages infrastructure complexities around AV scanning, firewalls, and load balancing via an intuitive web-based console or API-driven infrastructure allowing flexible consumption.
Cloudflare’s global cloud platform protects, accelerates, and streamlines traffic flow to web properties, leveraging Anycast technology spanning 300 cities globally. Additional solutions enhance security, content delivery, serverless computing, and internet applications.
NetApp’s hybrid multi-cloud data services portfolio helps consolidate file and block storage management across on-premise and AWS, Azure, and GCP public cloud environments using a unified orchestration control plane.
Virtustream enterprise cloud solutions specialize in hosting complex production applications using TAV Tech Solutions or Hyper-V through xStream cloud management software, ensuring security, compliance, efficiency, and uptime.
Cisco cloud solutions help connect, protect, automate, and analyze distributed IT assets spanning data centers, multi-cloud, and networking edges powered by UCS unified compute, the Intersight cloud management platform, and Nexus data center switch fabrics.
Red Hat Open Hybrid Cloud solutions built around the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system offer application services, management tools, and an ecosystem of certified containerized workloads through Automation Manager that can run on bare metal servers, virtual machines, and public and private clouds.
This comprehensive guide aimed to equip enterprise leaders with clarity on what factors are steering cloud adoption, the tangible and intangible benefits it confers, a structured framework on cloud provider evaluation, and detailed context on leading platforms that can potentially meet their evolving infrastructure needs.
With cloud platform complexity only increasing, viewing cloud migration as a lift-and-shift exercise is insufficient. Building foundational cloud governance procedures covering security baselines, access controls, networking, reliability, and cost management is vital even before embarking on the transformation journey.
Additionally, organizations must acknowledge that there is no “one size fits all” cloud provider suited for current and future workloads. Hence, evaluating tradeoffs across the spectrum of factors and aligning individual platform strengths to application architectures, user needs, security priorities, etc., is key to long-term success.
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