Businesses turn to alternative cloud providers

Over half of organizations are considering adding one or more cloud infrastructure providers in 2021, and the extra supplier will be drawn from an alternative cloud vendor.

A new report by Accelerated Strategies and Linode shows that for small and midsized companies usage of alternative providers -- such as OVH, Linode, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, UpCloud and Equinix -- is on par with Google Cloud.

"The greatest takeaway from the survey is collectively the alternative cloud providers are popular," Charles Kolodgy of Accelerated Strategies says. "We asked people who they are using and a majority of companies are working with the Hyperscale vendors (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) but a combined 30 percent of the companies surveyed are also using one of the alternative cloud providers. Alternative cloud providers (DigitalOcean, Equinix, Hetzner, Linode, OVHcloud, and UpCloud were selectable vendors in the survey) were more apt to be used by companies with less than 5,000 employees. ASG expects this category will grow as more companies adopt multicloud strategies."

The main decision-making factors around cloud purchases are a minimum uptime SLA of 99.99 percent (cited by 64 percent of respondents), API / CLI and cloud management tool support (57 percent), customer support availability (56 percent) and security / compliance certification (53 percent).

Blair Lyon, vice president cloud experience at Linode says:

There is a wide variety of use cases and tasks that developers have, from straight cloud hosting through to implementing CI/CD pipelines and running databases. It plays well into where we are with multi-cloud as a whole. We see developers using multiple cloud vendors where it suits them.

This is not a simple decision and there is no single approach with cloud. What is changing here is that the simple cloud services, like compute and storage, are getting easier to access and interact with across different cloud services. This makes multi-cloud more and more viable, especially for DevOps and their specific use cases. Developers want the freedom to choose the right service for the right job.

When asked what they look for in a supplier, over 50 percent of the responses named 'provides excellent data security' as critical. This was higher any of the other requirements. Important attributes in the financial category are 'predictable flat pricing' (30 percent), 'affordable and accessible' (25 percent), and 'proven to save money' (23 percent). Predictable pricing is more important for small companies (those with 500 or fewer employees) 36 percent of which name it as critical in their surveys.

You can find out more on the Linode blog.

Image credit: Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock