The Cost
of Cloud

One of the common misconceptions that leaves organisations tethered to hyperscalers is the perception that their business is more secure and stable with a larger public cloud provider. Despite pushback from businesses on soaring cloud costs, our research reinforces that firms are wary of leaving AWS, Azure or GCP for an alternative provider.

The top reasons cited for staying with the big three were:

• 51% believe the alternative cloud providers outside the 'Big Three' are less secure.
• 47% believe they will suffer more outages.
• 37% say it's more convenient.

There is nothing inherently insecure about cloud infrastructure. Security is a core part of the package when using cloud, with providers implementing best practise security controls and techniques.

The problem with the hyperscalers comes with their scale. Size is no guarantee of uptime for cloud providers. Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all suffered significant outages in the last year. One major outage of AWS's us-east 1 region in December 2021 led to Amazon services going offline for lots of US users, along with other applications that run on AWS infrastructure including Disney Plus.

The stats speak for themselves: Users of Amazon alone have suffered 27 outages in the last 12 months.

It should not be forgotten that these outages do not exist in a vacuum. Downtime has very real consequences for businesses. On a reputational level, outages damage trust in a business, negatively impacting partners' and customers' faith in a business to reliably deliver for them. It also has an economic cost. In today's connected world, companies rely on the cloud right across their operations, from customer-facing apps through to back-end functions like office or warehouse management systems.

Any outage here will hit firms financially, as customers who are unable to access a site look elsewhere, and staff are delayed in performing vital functions for the business.