Enterprises believe large cloud providers charge too much

The majority of businesses believe that large 'hyperscale cloud' providers are overcharging while also pursuing a narrative that their cloud offerings are low cost.

New research from cloud native provider Civo, based on responses from over 1,000 businesses, finds that 82 percent believe large public cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure overcharge their customers.

The study shows that 74 percent of businesses have seen their cloud costs increase in the past 12 months with an average price increase of 66 percent year-on-year. But despite this it's concerns around security and uptime -- rather than cloud lock-in -- that stops them from switching providers.

Mark Boost, CEO of Civo says:

Our research uncovered that a vast majority of customers think they are overpaying for their cloud service, and this is driven by a misperception that businesses are more secure and stable with the largest public cloud providers.

However, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all suffered high profile outages in the last year. Users of Amazon alone have suffered 27 outages in the last 12 months. Size is clearly no guarantee of uptime when it comes to cloud providers.

The additional complexity involved in securing public cloud endpoints using the hyperscalers means they are far more likely to be left insecure, and this is evidenced by the number of data breaches caused by simple misconfigurations of services like Amazon S3 or Microsoft's Azure Container Instances.

Bigger is rarely better when it comes to choosing a cloud provider. Hyperscalers have lots of unnecessary complexity and more moving parts in their offerings, increasing the chance of issues or bugs for users. In addition, the footprint of hyperscalers across an unwieldly amount of products and regions creates a far greater attack surface for bad actors to exploit.

The top reasons cited by companies for staying with the big three cloud providers are, believing the smaller cloud providers are less secure (51 percent), believing they will suffer more outages (47 percent), and simply that it's seen as more convenient (37 percent).

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