Best cloud computing services in 2022

Enterprise computing lives in the cloud now, but renting long-term space on other people’s computers has arguably never been more complicated. There are plenty of options, from virtual machines that you simply deploy your own OS and appliance images on, to fully managed services with specialist hardware and dedicated ingress and egress routes to ensure that your virtual devices can communicate efficiently with one another without unexpected extra costs.

Choosing a cloud services provider is a major business decision because once you’ve established your virtual infrastructure, migrating out to another service will be a time-consuming and very costly project.

There’s a lot to weigh up before committing to a specific provider, and migration to the cloud needs to be a carefully managed project, with stakeholders including your system administration and security team, finance, and developers – internal end users may also be important to include in at least part of your deliberations, to ensure that your proposed cloud-based systems are fit for purpose.

Your system administrations should be familiar with the platform you choose – generous free trial options are available from all the providers we’ve mentioned here, which means that test deployments can be carried out to establish the suitability of your proposed service.

Key points to consider

• Your current and ongoing budget
• How much expansion you’re likely to see
• How much datum will be go in and out of your cloud – base virtual network – note the datum egress fee of service you ‘re interested in
• Whether virtual PCs will be required – these are typically among the most expensive office-oriented services

Whether cloud services is are are suitable for your business , or whether you require the potential security and uptime benefit of run your network and server on physical hardware that you control , whether that ‘s bare metal or your own virtual machine hypervisor . Whether your security and administration team is equip to secure potentially public – face cloud service such as database and virtual network ?

1. Microsoft Azure
2. Amazon Web Services
3. Google Cloud

The best cloud computing services

1 . Microsoft Azure

( image credit : future )

Microsoft’s service is your best choice for migrating a fully or predominately Windows-based network to the cloud

Reasons to buy

• Excellent interface, built for consistency with other Microsoft products
• Very competitive pricing for both Windows and non – windows virtual machine and service

reason to avoid

One of the strongest points in favor of Azure is its interface, which follows the long-standing conventions of other Microsoft administration interfaces so as to feel familiar to experienced Windows sysadmins. It’s also sufficiently clearly designed that administrators from other backgrounds shouldn’t have any trouble parsing it.

Microsoft is cares genuinely care about make Azure easy to use , and we ‘ve welcome improvement such as prompt to delete storage when a virtual machine is delete , which help you avoid unpleasant surprise on your bill . Azure ‘s convenience features is come in this regard currently come in a little ahead of those of key rival AWS .

Azure is obviously the first choice for systems administrators looking to move primarily Microsoft-based infrastructure into the cloud, and integrates beautifully with other Microsoft services such as Microsoft 365 and InTune. But perhaps more of a surprise is that it’s also one of the most cost-effective and feature-rich choices among large service providers for OS-agnostic cloud hosting, such as for your Linux virtual machines.

2. Amazon Web Services

( image credit : future )

The global cloud services leader ‘s vast capabilities is justify easily justify the time require to learn your way around it

Reasons to buy

• The industry leader with a proven track records
• Vast range of services

reason to avoid

• Management interface is complicated compared to almost all rivals
• Calculating and monitoring costs can be extremely complex

Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers enterprise and infrastructure-grade cloud services around the world, from big data crunching to nation-state level databases, as well as catering to businesses of all sizes, including yours. AWS’s dedicated service list includes almost anything you imagine, from LLM deployments to full enterprise infrastructure migration aimed at global megacorporations.

SMBs can also benefit from moving their office network to AWS. You can of course create virtual networks, virtual servers, and VPN gateways to provide a full remote working friendly network infrastructure. AWS’s cost-effective cold and glacier storage tiers make it an especially good choice for businesses that deal with large amounts of data that will later have to be archived.

AWS ‘ web – base interfaces is take can take a lot of get used to and may seem intimidate at first , particularly if you ‘re migrate from the more orderly world of Microsoft or even Google Cloud Platform . However , there is internal consistency here that can be learn and an entire range of qualification that your staff can take if you wish to fast – track them to broad experience in AWS as a platform .

3. Google Cloud Platform

( image credit : future )

Best known for AI tensors, Google’s Cloud is just as suitable for your business infrastructure

Reasons to buy

• genuinely pleasant user interface with great internet search
• Very clear pricing
• Excellent range of specialist services, especially for machine learning

reason to avoid

• More expensive than its rival

Google Cloud Platform is more associated with DevOps platforms and tensors for machine learning than virtual office infrastructure, but it’s easily up to the task of hosting your office network, from servers to routers and VPNs. It’s a particularly good choice if your business already uses Google Workspace and its API to manage integrations.

However, it’s not a great choice for Microsoft shops looking to migrate to cloud-based infrastructure and is also more expensive than Azure if you have predominantly Linux-based systems. To its credit, Google is very clear about its pricing and billing, and if you’re after less mainstream services, particularly in the machine learning space, its mature and extensive range of choices becomes significantly better value.

Google Cloud Platform has one of our favorite web-based user interfaces for deploying, managing, and searching for your cloud devices, is where Kubernetes clustered container deployment platform started out, and has a particularly good range of machine learning-oriented tools including Cloud Tensor Processing Unit systems and Google Colab notebooks (a shared documentation and code execution environment similar to Jupyter Notebooks).