The 5 Best Cloud Service Providers In 2024

Guide to the 5 Best Cloud Service Providers This Year

29 March 2024

In this article, we evaluate key factors, including reliability, scalability, security, and customer support, and potential drawbacks such as vendor lock-in. The five here represent our picks for the best cloud service providers (CSPs) in 2024

What is a Cloud Service Provider (CSP)?

Cloud computing, as we know it, began in 2002 when Amazon sought a more efficient way to scale its online marketplace. By 2006, Amazon launched AWS, now the global leader in cloud services.

A cloud service provider (CSP) offers technology, infrastructure, and support. This is available as a service, without all the associated setup and maintenance costs. The scale of large companies like Amazon and Google allow them to have much lower marginal costs than would be possible for individual companies, and allow for much faster deployment. So the model of cloud computing has replaced self-hosted servers globally, even for large corporations and governments.

CSPs maintain data centers all over the world, allowing for continuous access and uptime. In addition to all the physical infrastructure of data centers, CSPs also provide all the software environments tailored to specific business sectors, making them essential.

Using a CSP vs. Owning Infrastructure

Most companies now avoid building their own cloud infrastructure due to cost, the need for extensive expertise, and continuous maintenance. There are some very clear benefits to this

• Capital costs: Avoiding significant CAPEX on infrastructure, paying only a usage-based fee
• Faster deployment: Plugging in to existing infrastructure avoids having to plan, purchase, and build it. This makes product development much faster, and more product-focused.
• Lower commitment: Using CSPs allows for a much more agile process in product positioning. If something doesn’t work, it’s easy to change and adapt without needing to consider infrastructure changes.
• Comprehensive environments: One cloud service provider contract will grant access to infrastructure, platforms, software, and serverless computing. All of this is developed at scale with infinitely more resources than any one company could build internally.
• Optimized delivery models: Public, private, and hybrid models.
• Pay-as-you-go: Resource costs can be managed with minimal commitment, and scaled up and down depending on need.
• Managed services: There is a high degree of configurability. Works out of the box, but everything can be modified to need.
• Data integrity: Colocation and backups mean that data can be recovered, when there are local outages and environmental events.

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) manage testing, updating, securing, and optimizing cloud infrastructure, enabling businesses to concentrate on their product areas.

Cloud Providers do have Drawbacks

There are lots of advantages to CSPs, but also some negatives to consider.

• Data privacy – Cloud services involve numerous third-parties, shared servers, remote resources to process, store, and manage data. This introduces multiple opportunities for compromising data confidentiality, often from parties you many not even be aware of existing. This can be prohibitive, when dealing with trade secrets and data that needs to remain confidential.
• Data security – Cloud computing via CSP infrastructure allows data to be transferred remotely and accessed from any device with an internet connection. This introduces opportunities for hackers to infiltrate the service providers’ systems. This can compromise customer data, leading to reputational damage, and potential lawsuits.
• Limitations in Infrastructure Control – To optimize the performance of their cloud services, some companies limit control over the backend. This can vary significantly between cloud service providers.
• Vendor Lock-In – There are a number of factors that make changing cloud service providers difficult and expensive. Migrating data and hosting, without creating down time requires a high degree of effort. And CSPs are increasingly using proprietary environments where there are significant setup costs to move to a new one. CSPs can change prices or terms, but the effort involved in moving makes the threshold for tolerating this higher.