Look Beyond the ‘Big 3’ for Enterprise Cloud Solutions

The cloud computing ecosystem is much larger than it may seem. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are rather popular, but in fact there are a number of other public cloud providers that may prove to be a better solution for certain companies.

IBM Cloud
If you haven’t paid much attention to the IBM cloud, please be aware that IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat gave the company’s cloud computing offerings a major boost. Today, IBM offers all of the same core cloud services as other providers, including IaaS, PaaS and DevOps and is arguably matched only by Azure when it comes to DevOps services.

Oracle Cloud
Oracle’s cloud has provided the backbone for a number of enterprise infrastructures for years. Oracle operates a very large public cloud with a strong track record of reliability. If you’re a large enterprise looking to expand your cloud strategy, the Oracle cloud should be on your radar.

DigitalOcean
If you like Linux and are looking for an IaaS provider, DigitalOcean is worth checking out. In addition to offering storage and virtual machine instances in the cloud, the company is now active in containers and Kubernetes.

Rackspace
Rackspace, another IaaS provider, has made “fanatical” customer support its selling point. The company has invested heavily in managed cloud-based services that require less expertise and management on the part of end users, so it’s a solution for those who are not totally confident in their ability to set up and manage everything themselves.

Alibaba
Alibaba may seem analogous to Amazon in many respects, yet that doesn’t mean it has nothing novel to offer. Probably its biggest advantage is that it has many more regions in Asia. At the same time, Alibaba’s list of cloud services is rapidly catching up to those of AWS and Azure, considering its relentless investment in cloud business, it’s a safe bet that it will get there soon.

Wasabi and Backblaze
Although these companies are competitors, we’ll discuss them together because they both offer just one core service: cloud storage. These companies provide more competitive pricing and performance if you simply have a lot of data that you want to store in the cloud.