Overview of 25 biggest cloud platforms in EU and North America

Overview

Are you looking for a reliable cloud platform and services? In this article, we’ve gathered for you the basic information about the top cloud providers in the EU and North America.

Biggest Cloud Platforms

We will start with the most famous companies and proceed to those that you may have not heard about. However, the entire cloud platforms list deserves your attention. For composing it, we analyzed various cloud platforms and chose the ones that could bring real value to your business. 

All the mentioned options have their peculiarities. Despite the fact that many of them offer quite similar services, some platforms have unique tools. It means that when you are looking for the best platform for your project, you should take into account your individual needs and the ways each of the biggest cloud companies can address them.

In our article, you can find only the most basic descriptions of each of the top cloud platforms. But we would like to encourage you to study more detailed information about the cloud providers whose offers seem to be the most attractive for you.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

If you are interested in cloud services, you definitely know this name. And it’s quite clear: AWS can boast a market share of around 32%. The platform offers easy management of cloud capacity that you use in order to achieve the highest efficiency and provides per-hour billing. AWS was founded in 2002 and the roll-out of the first products took place in 2006. Currently, its portfolio contains more than 200 services, including hybrid cloud, storage, databases, networking, development and migration tools. Today it is the world’s biggest cloud provider.

Microsoft Azure

This is the second-largest player in the cloud services market with a share of around 23%. The Microsoft Azure platform started its functioning in 2010. Today, being one of the top cloud platforms, it can offer you around 200 tools and services. A good point that works as an additional “plus” to its reputation is the fact that 95% of the Fortune 500 companies work with this platform. One of the peculiarities of Azure is that it lets its users set up a Linux or Windows virtual machine (VM) which can provide access to a wide range of software products. Moreover, a Linux or Windows desktop can be hosted on a VM in the cloud.

Google Cloud

This cloud services platform was launched in 2008 and today it posses a 10% market share. It offers a rich suite of cloud computing services that include hybrid and multi-cloud, data management, ML and AI. Google Cloud is used by companies from a lot of industries that really differ significantly. However, all its customers can enjoy the same benefits: the growth of operational agility, the reduction of costs as well as the capacity to explore new market opportunities. The company offers a very user-friendly policy which makes it possible for businesses of all sizes and formats to enjoy Google Cloud services.

Alibaba Cloud

The next one on our list of cloud-based platforms is Alibaba Cloud. It was presented for wide circles in 2009 and since that time it has won around 6% of the global market. Its cloud computing services are targeted mainly at online businesses, however, they are used within Alibaba’s e-commerce ecosystem as well. Alibaba Cloud offers a free trial period for its 40+ products and a starter package at a very pleasant cost to make the acquaintance with its platform as pleasant as possible. Moreover, its customers have access to the China Gateway solutions which helps international businesses to enter the Chinese market and scale up there.

IBM Cloud

IBM is one of the biggest cloud companies. It has rich expertise in the cloud computing sphere and it is not surprising that it is definitely one of the market leaders today with its 170+ tools and services including but not limited to such technologies and aspects as AI, ML, blockchain, containers and data. The platform has IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings that are delivered via public, private and hybrid cloud models. IBM Cloud customers have the possibility to enjoy very flexible payment terms and, moreover, there are a lot of tools that are provided by the company free of charge.

Salesforce

We also should name Salesforce as one of the major cloud platforms. The company is one of the leaders in cloud computing. It offers apps for different aspects of business, such as CRM, customer service, business analysis, sales, marketing and many others. Salesforce provides various types of clouds: Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Integration Cloud, Commerce Cloud. And that’s not the end of this list. All of them have numerous tools that significantly facilitate many processes for businesses. Today there are more than 150,000 businesses from all over the world that use Salesforce products.

Tencent Cloud

It is a cloud service provided by the largest Chinese internet company Tencent. Hundreds of millions of users in 27 regions across the world enjoy the benefits of this high-performance, reliable and absolutely secure service. The company is gradually expanding its presence over the regions. Currently, Tencent Cloud has more than 1 million servers worldwide. Today there are over 300 products available covering databases, networking, computing and other aspects. Among the advantages that Tencent customers name, it is important to highlight easy deployments and low costs.

Oracle Cloud

This cloud computing service is offered by Oracle Corporation. It provides servers, apps, networking tools, storage and other services via a global network of managed data centers. With the help of this stack of products, you can create, test, deploy and integrate apps in the cloud. Before starting your work with Oracle Cloud, you can opt for a 30-day trial period first. Moreover, there are some services that are always free. This is one of the popular cloud platforms and it is available in 25 regions of the world, including the countries of the European Union and North America. It can be available as a public, private or hybrid cloud.

Kamatera

 It is a cloud services platform that can be used by companies of any type and size including start-ups and large enterprises. Its infrastructure is globally distributed and its advanced data centers are based in numerous locations. Today there are tens of thousands of clients who trust Kamatera thanks to the highest level of security and reliability as well as limitless scalability and excellent performance that it ensures. The Kamatera platform guarantees that its servers run 99.95% of the time. So you should not worry about their slowing down and possible negative effect on your business.

Intel Cloud

Clouds powered by Intel are known for their reliability and scalability. Intel collaborates with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to deliver the most cutting-edge solutions for its users. The cloud deployment strategy always depends on the needs of each business, that’s why to make its services available to the broadest audience Intel can offer public, private and hybrid cloud models as well as multi-cloud.

Linode

 Linode is a 100% independent open cloud provider founded in 2003 that serves customers in 196 countries. And today its base includes over 800,000 clients. It offers a comprehensive set of tools for building, deploying and scaling apps quickly and seamlessly. The company guarantees predictable pricing and no surprises in the bills.

Cloudways

The next position on our cloud platforms list belongs to Cloudways. It is a managed cloud hosting platform that partners with such strong players in the industry as AWS, Google Cloud, Linode and others. Even those users who do not have any specific knowledge and skills in cloud server management will be able to create, deploy and operate apps with Cloudways.

DigitalOcean

This cloud platform helps developers to build, test, manage, deploy and scale apps of any size. The solutions provided by DigitalOcean can greatly improve the performance of cloud applications as well as to increase their security.

Vultr

This advanced cloud services platform was founded in 2014. Vultr offers powerful computer instances including dedicated cloud ones, fully automated bare metal dedicated servers, SSD-backed scalable storage. It also provides Vultr API to automate numerous processes for your business.

Serverspace

The company offers fast and secure cloud computing on-demand solutions. To save the time of its users, the Serverspace platform provides some pre-configured templates of applications and OS. With its cloud capabilities, it is quite easy to create a powerful infrastructure for development.

Liquid Web

The cloud services platform offers cloud servers, cloud dedicated servers as well as a hosted private cloud. The solutions provided by Liquid Web are customizable and provide users with the possibility to easily scale their apps.

Rackspace

The company is one of the cloud computing services pioneers and delivers multi-cloud solutions. The range of the services includes databases, cloud servers. hosting, cloud backup, etc. With its multi-cloud, hybrid, private and public cloud platforms Rackspace can meet all the needs and demands of modern businesses.

MassiveGrid

MassiveGrid offers virtual and dedicated private clouds to ensure reliable and secure cloud hosting with high availability. The wide portfolio of solutions includes streamlined and integrated services (PaaS, cloud servers, dedicated servers, etc.) that are fully customizable.

NaviSite

NaviSite delivers a wide range of services and solutions, including hosting, cloud desktop and cloud infrastructure services. Among its customers, there are mainly mid-size businesses and enterprises. It’s also worth mentioning that NaviSite boasts over 1 million databases deployed to the cloud.

OpenNebula

It is a cloud computing platform that helps to efficiently and easily manage heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures. OpenNebula is an open-source platform that provides IaaS for creating private, hybrid or edge cloud implementations. With OpenNebula, developers can enjoy absolute vendor independence, scalability and flexibility.

Cloud Foundry

Being an industry-standard cloud platform, Cloud Foundry offers a model for cloud-native app delivery on Kubernetes. It ensures flexible infrastructure, open-source code and wide community support. With this platform, businesses can easily reduce costs and avoid the complexity of creating an infrastructure for their applications.

Dell Technologies Cloud

Dell Technologies Cloud is a hybrid cloud solution that guarantees the fastest deployment as well as easy management. The cloud services platform unites the capacities of the VMware software and the infrastructure built by Dell Technologies. If you want to migrate your software to this cloud, it won’t take long.

SAP Cloud

It is a PaaS developed and managed by SAP SE. It provides a secure cloud environment for building new apps and extending already functioning apps. With the SAP Cloud platform users have a lot of possibilities including the creation of unlimited HTML apps, testing Java apps, connecting to up to two on-premises systems.

Limestone Networks

The company is a provider of on-demand cloud tools, bare-metal servers, and colocation solutions. One of the offerings from Limestone is the public cloud computing service OnePortal Rapid that provides a feature-rich and swift platform.

CloudSigma

This cloud servers & hosting platform was founded in 2009 and offers flexible services to customers in Europe and the US. With the solutions provided by CloudSigma, you can fully control your cloud environment and run any OS unmodified.

Biggest cloud provider: How to choose the most appropriate option

Today the demand for cloud services is continuously growing. That’s why top cloud platforms do their best to expand the range of the offered tools and services to better address the needs of different businesses.

When we were considering the biggest cloud companies for creating our list, we paid attention to such parameters as:

• The year of their foundation (for example, AWS, which is the biggest cloud provider entered the market in 2002, and in 2006, its first products were publicly launched);
• Their market share (AWS has the biggest one);
• The number of offered tools and services (as of April 2024, AWS provides over 200 services);
• Their reputation (without any doubt, the major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have an outstanding reputation among users, which greatly contributes to their growth).

If you want to choose the most reliable platform to work with, we recommend you attentively examine the list of the top 25 cloud providers in the EU and North America and choose among them. However, you also should pay attention to the financial terms offered by the companies. Their prices, as well as pricing models, can differ significantly. That’s why the selection of the most feasible variant can help you greatly optimize your budget. Many platforms have a free trial period. Thanks to using it, you can better understand whether you are carefully satisfied with their services and tools. 

In case of any questions, you can contact us and get the necessary consultation. At Softacom, we have robust expertise in working with cloud technologies and we will be always ready to help you transform your business processes with our services.