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A Brief Look at Offerings From the Top Cloud Providers Featured

A Brief Look at Offerings From the Top Cloud Providers body of water near trees under blue sky during daytime

The big cloud providers all want your business and are constantly rolling out new offerings designed to attract and retain customers. In this article, we are going to look at some of the flagship products and services available from the largest public cloud vendors ranked by revenue in mid-2021 as determined by Statista

Microsoft Azure

Azure is the leading cloud vendor based on revenue and offers a wide variety of products and services addressing the needs of small, medium, and large businesses. The company has capitalized on the installed Windows operating system customer base and prioritizes integration with legacy systems.  

The combination of legacy support and cutting-edge tech logic make Azure a viable choice for enterprises migrating workloads to the cloud or operating hybrid environments. Cloud-managed instances of the popular SQL Server relational database provide just one example of the specific solutions available from Azure.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon may lack the enterprise relationship onramp enjoyed by Azure but makes up for it with its constant innovation and quality of its products and services. Some of its distinctive offerings include its analytics and data lakes, machine learning, and extensive storage options for everything from disaster recovery to long-term archiving.  

Amazon offers free trials of many solutions such as Amazon Lightsail, used to launch and manage virtual private servers, Amazon EC2, providing virtual cloud servers, and SageMaker, to build and train machine learning models. AWS is also the only major cloud provider to offer macOS virtual server support. 

IBM Cloud

The offerings of the IBM cloud are tailored to meet the needs of the company’s large and medium-sized enterprise clients. IBM concentrates on PaaS and IaaS solutions. Acquiring Red Hat in 2019 demonstrates a commitment to an open and hybrid approach to cloud infrastructure. 

IBM’s cloud offers extensive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning solutions that make use of the company’s Watson supercomputer.  As hybrid environments continue to propagate throughout the IT world, IBM’s migration and management tools provide customers with a viable path when moving from on-premises data centers to the cloud.   

Salesforce

Some readers may be surprised at Salesforce’s inclusion in the top cloud vendors, but the company’s array of SaaS solutions is impressive. From its beginnings as primarily a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, Salesforce has expanded its offerings to encompass many cloud-based enterprise software solutions.  

Its Slack-first Customer 360 combines sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, and analytics solutions to provide small and large businesses with an innovative way to work while employing digital workflows. Salesforce concentrates on SaaS offerings and is not the right cloud vendor if you are looking for cloud storage or infrastructure solutions.  

Google Cloud Platform

Google’s cloud strategy strongly supports cloud-native solutions based on open source and open systems. This makes it attractive to companies looking to add specific capabilities to multi-cloud environments. Google offers machine learning support with vision, speech, and natural language APIs. Google’s advanced technical capabilities make it a viable choice for solutions in the field of data analytics, AI, and machine learning. 

This is just a sampling of the incredible diversity of cloud offerings available to customers in 2021. Virtually any organization can find a solution that helps them meet their business objectives. It’s just a matter of selecting the right cloud.

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 Robert Agar

I am a freelance writer who graduated from Pace University in New York with a Computer Science degree in 1992. Over the course of a long IT career I have worked for a number of large service providers in a variety of roles revolving around data storage and protection. I currently reside in northeastern Pennsylvania where I write from my home office.

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