Everyone from individuals to major corporations has opted to use cloud services over the past decade. Moreover, there is an increased need for these services caused by work-from-home arrangements at the height of the pandemic. Hence, it isn’t surprising that cloud spending is at an all-time high.
Indeed, experts noted that 27% of global decision-makers invested in the cloud over the past couple of years.
But while Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Compute, and Microsoft Azure remain the services in the lead, nearly two-thirds of all cloud-using organizations are contemplating a shift to alternative cloud solution providers.
The search for alternative solutions
Since 2018, 27% of cloud-using organizations have contracted the services of alternative providers, particularly DigitalOcean, Linode by Akamai, and OVHcloud.
This was the observation made during a study by Linode in cooperation with Techstrong Research. The study’s results were recently made public and show that most companies are ready to switch from the Big Three to smaller yet equally reliable and more cost-efficient alternative providers.
The rise of these alternatives has been driven primarily by a need for more affordable, agile, and scalable cloud solutions among companies poised for substantial growth in the near future. Indeed, it is possible that the more popular among these alternatives may grow big enough to challenge the three current market leaders.
Not new, but ever innovative
Alternative cloud solutions providers have actually been around since 2003, but it has only been recently that their appeal to organizations has picked up steam.
For the most part, an organization opts for an alternative cloud provider when it needs to scale up its operational agility. At the same time, using an alternative to the Big Three enables such an organization to build multi-cloud environments to meet specific needs rather than rely on “one size fits all” solutions.
According to Akamai’s head of cloud experience Blair Lyon, using an alternative public cloud is advantageous in terms of agility, availability, cost, performance, and even security. In doing so, these alternatives simplify processes that would usually be highly complex on larger, more prominent platforms. Given this, it can also be said that alternative cloud platforms offer a more manageable learning curve as well as a better user experience.
It should also be noted that pricing for these alternatives is a lot less complex, is actually more affordable, and bundles numerous tools and services with its core product – something that is never done by the bigger players.
Likewise, while large-scale cloud providers tend to be rigid when it comes to modes of payment, alternative providers allow for more flexibility as these accept app-driven payment methods as well as cryptocurrency.
