What are the best cloud computing companies?

Cloud computing is on the rise. In practice, it is the use of remote servers or development platforms on the Internet rather than an own physical local server. It facilitates storing and managing data in most efficient way and those businesses that have already tried the cloud, now wonder how one could run business operations without it. Commonly, we categorize cloud services into infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). It is all about efficiency, resource economy, cost reduction. So if you are interested in finding such tech partner, here’s the list of top-20 cloud computing companies. 

Best cloud computing companies 

Whether you need better web hosting, smart analytics based on big data, or inventory management, there are B2B companies offering cloud services you can hire. You should be aware of 3 cloud computing aspects and things such  cloud vendors typically provide:

• You pay only pays for services you use (memory, processing time, bandwidth, etc.);
• Cloud computing companies take care of the back-end;
• Scalable services and option to pay on demand.

Being part of an international IT based service and having 23 years of experience, Kamatera is a global cloud services platform provider, providing enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure products to organizations of all types and sizes.

Kamatera provides Servers with all available operating systems such as Windows and Linux, and also allows deployment of the most popular Applications in the cloud for free (such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento etc.), without any commitment or setup fee.

The company is operating in 13 global data centers, with thousands of servers worldwide, serving tens of thousands of clients including start-ups, application developers, international enterprises, and SaaS providers.

One of Kamatera’s biggest advantages: users can Customize the VPS services tailored to their needs and its method is: pay as you go – instant scaling for ultimate savings. Users can add up or scale down services they don’t need in a click of a button, and decide if they want to be charged hourly or monthly.

Key features: cloud services, from hosting virtual private servers, to cloud servers with web hosting panel, to wordpress and cpannel’s server hosting, to cloud servers and cloud private network, and also cloud firewall and managed cloud services.

Pricing:

• 30 Day Free Trial to test the services;
• Customized and Tailored Made VPS Hosting to fit your needs;
• VPS prices starts from as low as $4 a month;
• Billing options – Per Month or Per Day

Headquarters: New York, U.S. / Launched: 1995 / Employees: 300/ Contact: +1 212 738 9657
Website: https://www.kamatera.com/ 

One of the top-European companies, CloudSigma is a pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. In 2009 they were offering the private and public cloud service, but four years later they already launched hybrid cloud service.

Today’s CloudSigma is a robust platform with a set of powerful and efficient computing tools, and, fortunately, with a very democratic price making policy. Thanks to collaboration with Ubuntu, OpenVPN, New Relic and other software developers, CloudSigma provides plenty of external integrations.

Constant updates and launching new cloud products like CoreOS, Apache Libcloud Driver, Ansible Integration, help to keep everyday computing process at the highest level of quality and productivity.

Key features: high performance, SSD & magnetic storage, custom KVM Cloud, instant provisioning.

Pricing:

• 7-day free trial
• 1 CPU Core $0.0195/hr
• 1 GB RAM $0.0070/hr
• Data Transfer $0.04/GB outbound
• 1 GB SSD Storage $0.132930 days

Headquarters: Zurich, Switzerland / Founded: 2009 / Employees: 36 / Contact: info@cloudsigma.com / Website https://www.cloudsigma.com 

Microsoft is the name which does need to be introduced. Being the second biggest company in the cloud computing market, Azure offers ultimate options to integrate with all Microsoft services. The platform is available in private, public and hybrid models and it supports almost all operating systems, programming languages and frameworks.

Covering all three cloud services options, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, the Microsoft offspring provides all necessary tools for building, managing and deployment of applications and services.

The Microsoft Azure’s marketplace is quite extensive. More than five thousands applications, both created by Microsoft or its partners, are available for free, “pay as you go” and “bring your licence” payment models.

All Azure services, third-party applications, and related products can cover the following categories: compute, networking, storage (Blob, Queue, File and Disk Storage), Web and mobile (App Service), containers, databases, analytics, AI and machine learning (Computer Vision API, Face API), IoT, integration, security, dev  and management tools, Blockchain.

Key features: hybrid cloud applications, IoT, ecommerce, LOB applications, business intelligence, big data and analytics, data warehouse, backup and archive, disaster recovery, digital marketing and media, high-performance computing, microservice applications, gaming (building, launching, scalability), serverless computing.

Pricing:

• Free account;
• Pay-as-you-go rates;
• Pricing calculator;
• TCO Calculator.  

Headquarters: Redmond, WA, U.S. / Launched: 2008 / Employees: 148 557/ Contact: +1800566774 / Website https://azure.microsoft.com 

Despite its leadership in the Internet search, Google Cloud Platform cannot reach the same success in the cloud computing sphere. Starting as PAAS cloud computing service, later the company began to provide IAAS and SAAS. Currently being the third biggest cloud platform, Google has plans to become the most affordable cloud service. Already its pricing model is one of the main benefits to work with this company.

Google Cloud Platform offers products and services in compute (Compute Engineer, App Engine), storage and databases (Storage, SQL, Bigtable), Cloud AI (AutoML ALPHA, Cloud TPU), Big Data (BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow), API platform and ecosystems, data transfer, identity and security, developer and management tools, networking, IoT. The industries-winners from working on this platform can be education, financial services, gaming, government, healthcare, media and entertainment, retail.

Key features: hybrid cloud, workload migration, API management, serverless computing, web hosting, eCommerce, serverless app development, data integration and advanced analytics, productivity suite, file and device management.

Pricing:

• Free trial;
• Pay-as-you-go rates;
• Pricing Calculator.

Headquarters: Mountain View, CA, U.S. / Launched: 2010 / Employees: 85 454 / Contact
Website https://cloud.google.com/ 

“This is not a cloud. This is IBM cloud” – the company’s slogan. Previously known under such brands as SmartCloud, SoftLayer, Bluemix, Cloudburst, Smart Business and SmartCloud, today ’s cloud computing platform offers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services, both private and public.

The biggest benefit of this system, that it allows choosing the working infrastructure. It depends on you, will you work with bare metal (you choose the processor, hard drive configuration, RAM, port speed), virtual servers (you can select cores, storage, and RAM) or with cloud storage.

IBM Cloud Platform helps to build, deploy, and manage apps with using such programming languages as Node, Go, Ruby, Java, Swift, Python and PHP. Among 120 offering services and products, you can find tools to operate compute process, network (CDN, VPN), security, data management (SQL, NoSQL) and analytics (Apache Spark), etc. 

Key features: building and running websites, web and native mobile apps, DevOps, disaster recovery, backup and restore, hybrid IT management, digital business automation, high-speed data transfer, high-performance computing, GPU computing, API economy, SaaS integration.

Pricing:

• Lite (Free) account;
• Pay as you go rates;
• Pricing Calculator.

Headquarters: Armonk, NY, U.S. / Launched: 2007 / Employees: 559 651 / Contact: +18004264968 / Website https://www.ibm.com/cloud/ 

Multi-vendor of cloud solutions, Red Hat provides both IAAS and PAAS cloud computing services. The company offers private, public, and hybrid cloud deployment. Mainly working with financial services, government, healthcare, telecom, this cloud computing company provides flexible management and administration tools to run businesses.

Optimizing, automation and managing IT products, apps, data, and processes integrations, adding and managing cloud systems are the major fields of Red Hat’s concern.

Taking into account all the needs of modern enterprises, Red Hat has developed great tools to create and host apps and other IT products in a cloud environment. For example, its OpenStack Platform helps to virtualize and migrate data from hardware into clouds, organize and coordinate them.

The service assists in managing and tracking costs and resources, deploy a secure private cloud, provides ready-to-use cloud Ceph Storage. Others are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Features: integrated life-cycle management, on-demand workload deployment, fast storage deployment, self-healing and self-managing platform, no vendor dependency, etc.  

Pricing:

• Starter – free account;
• Pro – starts at $50/mo;
• Individual pricing plans.

Headquarters: Raleigh, NC, U.S. / Founded: 1993 / Employees: 10 025 / Website https://redhat.com 

A PaaS service platform, SAP provides tools and services to build and deploy cloud-ready sample app, extensions, and open integration, to connect any digital products regardless of where they are or by whom they were developed. The platform allows connection and integration with other SAP cloud systems and solutions like SAP HANA and Databases, application integration and infrastructure, data warehousing, Big Data, enterprise information management.

Over 1300 applications from the SAP App Center will help customers to accelerated app development and boost business transformation processes. And  SAP API Business Hub with its catalog of all available API packages simplifies the app development process.

Key features: analytics, business services, collaboration, data and storage, DevOps, integration services, IoT, machine learning, runtime and containers, security, user experience, security.

Pricing:

• Free trial;
• Subscription-based starts at €399/mo;
• Consumption-based;
• Estimator.

Headquarters: Walldorf, BW, Germany / Founded: 1972 / Employees: 106 187 / Contact: +16106611000 / Website https://cloudplatform.sap.com/index.html 

Amazon Web Services rapidly became the #1 solutions among all cloud computing companies. Starting from its inception in 1996 and being deployed in 2006, AWS now has over 1 million monthly active customers and offers the most popular cloud tools for numerous industries.

As IAAS cloud platform, Amazon supplies highly customized products and services. Most of its cloud solutions are third-party applications, with APIs available for better engagement with them. AWS control is carried by web interface (AWS console), and Command Line Tools.

The company’s products help the small business and big enterprises to grow faster, cut IT costs, and remain scalable. Their services cover compute, storage, database, migration, developer tools, management tools, media services, security, analytics, machine learning, mobile services, AR/VR, app integration, customer engagement, IoT, business productivity spheres.

Key features: web hosting, backup and restore, archiving, DevOps, data lakes and analytics, serverless computing, business applications, content delivery, blockchain, hybrid cloud architectures, ecommerce, digital marketing, etc.

Pricing:

• 12 months free account;
• Pay-as-you-go rates;
• Monthly calculator;
• TCO Calculator.

Headquarters: Seattle, WA, U.S. / Launched: 2006 / Employees: 27 519 / Contact / Website https://aws.amazon.com/ 

Thank the variety and quality of offering solutions, VMware is named as one of the leaders among cloud computing and virtualization companies. Their products help to run, manage, connect and secure application and IT supply systems on any cloud and device.

Serving public, private, and hybrid cloud structures, VMware provides solutions in modernization data centres, integration public clouds, empowering the digital workspace, transforming security, virtualization management and virtual cloud network

VMware has in its assortment five cloud products – Cloud Foundation, vRealize Suite, Cloud-Native Apps, Pivotal Container Service, NSX Cloud. The first two deliver enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure and manage IT services in multi-cloud environments accordingly.

Cloud Foundation, as a key service, has a set of impressive features – integrated stack, high performance and scalable hyper-converged storage, standardized architecture, automated lifecycle management, end-to-end security, flexible deployment options.

Key features: enterprise-grade network virtualization, direct console access, custom virtual machine sizing, multiple virtual data centers and authorization controls, SSD-accelerated storage, offline data transfer, logical templates, services, and application components.

Pricing:

• Compute $5,978/mo;
• Storage $720/mo;
• Bandwidth $1,191/mo;
• Public IPs $78/mo.

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA, U.S./ Founded: 1998 / Employees: 20 770 / Contact: +18774869273 / Website https://www.vmware.com/ 

Oracle Cloud provides SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and DaaS, all to accelerate business transformation. Software as a service helps corporations to deal with customer experience, human capital management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and delivers Internet of Things Applications. Cloud Marketplace counts more than thousand apps, all with inbuilt social, mobile, and analytic capabilities.

In turn, Oracle cloud platform has tools to work with enterprise applications: build, deploy, integrate and manage. It also supports open standards and open-source solutions, numerous programming languages, databases, tools, and frameworks.

With 430,000 customers in 175 countries, the company recently announced the extension of its cloud services by supporting artificial intelligence, machine learning, the blockchain, and IoT cloud products.

Key features: high-performance computing, Big Data applications, multiple tunnels networking, capacity on-demand.

Pricing:

• Free account;
• Pay as you go rates;
• Cost Estimator.

Headquarters: Redwood Shores, CA, U.S./ Founded: 1997 / Employees: 162 578 / Contact: +18006330738 / Website https://cloud.oracle.com/home  

Salesforce is not just one of the biggest American cloud computing companies, but also a known name in the whole industry. By providing PAAS and SAAS cloud computing services, Salesforce is an all-in-one solution for small business, startups and non-profit organizations. The platform gives the opportunity to build, boost and scale business from one place, even from its integrated mobile app.

All their services and solutions Salesforce united into few complex products. Platform Cloud lets to automate, and mobilize business processes, has tools to build, run, manage, and optimize apps.

Sales Cloud helps to connect customers and sell faster from any device. Service Cloud provides advances customer support – fast and intuitive. Marketing Cloud helps to collect, unify, and operating data for better customer experiences.

Key features: account and contact management, files sync and share, omnichannel routing, opportunity tracking, sales analytics.

Pricing:

• Free trial;
• Essentials $25/mo;
• Professional  $75/mo;
• Enterprise $150/mo;
• Platform Starter  $25/mo;
• Platform Plus $100/mo;
• Unlimited $300/mo.

Headquarters: San Francisco, U.S. / Founded: 1999 / Employees: 27 716/ Contact: +18556138968 / Website https://www.salesforce.com/ 

Best known as networking vendor, Cisco has become one of the key players among the world biggest cloud computing companies. But instead of chasing the leaders like Microsoft Azure or AWS, Cisco introduced its own product strategy. Their Unified Computing System is committed to developing Intercloud environment, which allows consumers to use services across multiple clouds.

Unified Computing, Unified Fabric and Unified Network Services – Cisco cloud computing infrastructure – are focused on simplifying, secure, and optimize the business across multi-cloud environment. Offering cloud products have a deal with management, security, analytics, and networking.

Cisco Webex Meetings, Cisco CloudCenter, Cisco Container Platform, vEdge (Viptela), Cisco Cloud Services Platform 2100, Cisco Cloudlock are just a few good examples. These tools provide secure cloud access and connection, application management, analytics infrastructure and application insights, etc.

Key features: actionable intelligence, flexible container management, intent-based data center, easy migration to a hybrid, multi-cloud models, high-performance computing.

Pricing: subscription-based model.
Headquarters: San Jose, CA, U.S. / Founded: 1984 / Employees: 83 161 / Contact:+18005536387 / Website https://www.cisco.com/ 

Verizon provides a suite of cloud services and tools combined with a flexible platform. All these help to build and configure a cloud deployment, connect and relocate existing systems from one unified infrastructure. The company’s approach helps to empower the business, make it scalable and ready to market changes.

Providing both public and private cloud service, Verizon indicates on the built-in security measures of the last, developed in accordance with business’ needs and possible workloads. The company also provides Secure Cloud Interconnect – the reliable protection for using multiple clouds.

Built for enterprise, Verizon cloud computing platform is ready for the complex deployments and specific to your business unique requirements. It provides migration tools, delivers powerful network and dependable performance. As a result, you get the one-cloud solution, flexible and automatized, able to cope with major IT tasks.

Key features: secure multi-tenant environment, custom network settings, Verizon Cloud Console management, object-based storage, access to computing, storage, and cloud marketplace services.

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Headquarters: Basking Ridge, NJ, U.S. / Founded: 1983 / Employees: 74 937 / Contact: 18772977816
Website http://www.verizonenterprise.com 

Hewlett Packard became another one information technology giant, which has expanded its services by providing cloud computing. Based on OpenStack architecture, the company offers solutions for private, public and hybrid cloud services. Still young in this new IT industry, HPE Cloud promotes building, deploying, and managing applications.

The hybrid cloud environment is able to reduce cost, boost productivity, and provides simplicity and agility in use. OneSphere, Saas cloud management platform will help to control utilization of clouds, increase apps-to-ops ratio, accelerate cycle time and enable fast app deployment.

Key features: end-to-end agility, consumption-based IT,  dynamically scale resources, cross-cloud (on- and off-premises) resource pool, bare metal, cloud containers.

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA, U.S. / Founded: 1934 / Employees: 222 117/ Contact:  +16506875817 / Website https://www.hpe.com 

The cloud services, provided by this company, are designed to help business to grow fast, to set the smooth connections among all systems and automate processes across the enterprise. With the intuitive interface, Now Platform, built as PaaS service, can take care of IT service management, security operations, customer service, and human resources. It supports outside plug‑and‑play applications and can be easily integrated with any enterprise structures.

Now Platform is also suitable for the app development, provided industry-standard dev tools. Mainly works with financial, government, healthcare and life sciences industries, ServiceNow delivers solutions for IT, security (automate, predict, digitize, optimize, monitor), HR, customer service and  Intelligent Applications

Key features: mobile‑first approach, no code/low code development, intelligent business apps, no proprietary coding languages required

Pricing: calculator
Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA, U.S. / Founded: 2004 / Employees: 7 176 / Contact / Website https://www.servicenow.com/ 

Following Amazon experience, Alibaba has slowly, but successful stepped out from retail industry into the world of high technologies. China’s biggest public service vendor is offering elastic computing, database Services, storage & CDN, application service, domains and website hosting, monitoring and management, security.

Elastic Compute Service deserves special attention. With an elastic virtual cloud server, you can expect fast performance and achievements of results, high-level security, provided by Anti-DDoS protection.

As for the marketplace, the consumers are offered with more than 200 hundred products. All developer tools, software infrastructure or business software, free or paid, are developed for both Linux and Windows systems.

Key features: enterprise-oriented computing instances, storage and networking, next generation architecture for financial services, support of e-commerce platform, DevOps, data migrations,  digital marketing, building enterprise apps.

Pricing:

• Prepaid payment from $9/mo to $99/mo;
• Pay-As-You-Go
• Price calculator

Headquarters: Hangzhou, Chine / Founded: 2009 / Employees: 1672 / Contact: +61283798028 / Website https://www.alibabacloud.com/ 

Pretty young, but already earning a good reputation in the cloud computing industry. DigitalOcean, unlike most of the competing companies, has chosen developers as its targeting audience. As they ensure, their cloud platform was built and designed with focus on the simplicity.

Such approach makes it easy to build, deploy, and scale cloud applications, fast and efficient. The additional service will be arranged from September 2018. DigitalOcean is going to launch free Kubernetes cluster, to simplify the way of deployment and management container workloads.

Key features: advanced equipment, intuitive API/control panel, pre-built apps, optimized compute types, cluster deployments.

Pricing: pay-as-you-go.
Headquarters:New York, U.S. / Founded: 2012 / Employees: 425 / Contact
Website https://www.digitalocean.com/ 

The U.S. number one carrier for Ethernet services, CenturyLink now also provides public and private cloud services. Currently, the company counts 72 data centres around the world, including USA, Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia.

Trying to succeed in the cloud computing area, the company offers public and private cloud services. But there biggest proud is a hybrid and integrated cloud environment, which is able to manage all business tasks.

CenturyLink’ private cloud, in essence, is the best choice to fast build, deploy and flexible customize any of the IT applications. With Hybrid IT solutions, you also can integrate and manage your private cloud with the public cloud, fast and easy transfer data, control and manage them.  

Key features: multi-cloud management, SaaS applications, SAP ecosystem, Big Data as a Service.

Pricing:

• Free trial;
• Pay-as-you-go;
• Price estimator.

Headquarters: Monroe, LA, U.S. / Founded: 1930 / Employees: 29 174/ Contact: +18553881260 / Website: https://www.ctl.io/ 

Workday was the first one to make early steps in providing cloud software-as-a-service business applications. Their solutions for the enterprise resource planning differ by its ability to grow, change, and evolve with your organization, adjust to new conditions.

Workday works with different spheres of life and business but gives the preference to the following ones: communications, energy and resources, finance, K-12, hospitality, retail, government and healthcare. Workday Cloud Platform lets you build personalized and secure applications.

The cloud service is especially good for developing apps to power, control and manage workflows, tailor working processes to the special requirements.  

Key features: flexible cloud platform, Data-as-a-Service, financial management, Workday Prism Analytics.
Pricing: Pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Headquarters: Pleasanton, CA, U.S. / Founded: 2005 / Employees: 9 835 / Contact: +18779675329 / Website https://www.workday.com 

And the dessert. Adobe Creative Cloud was developed mainly for the consumers of other Adobe products. This platform allows using every Adobe app for design, photography, video, and web from the desktop or mobile devices.

Creative Cloud offers different solutions and plans of use for individual, schools, university, and enterprises. It is all about creating – you can design, prototype and share projects. Typekit, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Adobe Muse, Adobe XD, Dreamweaver, Character Animator and many others products are available depending on subscription plan.

Such corporations as Fox Sports, Sony, and Uber, already tried and got the benefits from the Creative Cloud enterprise solutions. 20+ mobile and desktop apps, both macOS and Windows native, Creative Cloud Libraries, Adobe Stock, Experience Cloud integration help to create and manage applications throughout the organization.

The other two products, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, provide even more tools for digital transformation: advertising cloud, analytics, experience manager, Email marketing, etc.

Key features: the set of all Adobe products, enhanced security and control, audience manager, data management platform, error-proof workflows.

Pricing:

• Free trial;
• Individuals $9.99/mo, $20.99/mo, $52.99/mo, $82.98/mo;
• Business $79.99/mo or $33.99/mo;
• Students and Teachers $19.99/mo;
• Schools and Universities from $14.99/mo to $299.88/yr.

Headquarters: San Jose, CA, U.S. / Founded: 1982 / Employees: 18 517 / Contact: +18005850774 / Website https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html