The cloud industry is continuing to grow every year. According to Gartner, the total market revenue was $260bn in 2017, and it’s expected to grow to over $410bn by 2020. Still dominated by some of the larger players, 2017 concluded with AWS holding 62% of the cloud industry’s total market share, Azure 20%, and GCP 12%. While there is obviously much at stake for these big three, smaller service providers are taking advantage of the growth by finding niches. The desire for more personalized, multilingual support as well as consideration around the appropriate private, hybrid, and multi-cloud strategies have specific demands that require specialized cloud providers. Such demands are made all the more urgent by the growing complexity of data sovereignty worldwide. There are many reasons why customers may choose to work with regional cloud providers - here are some key ones.
- Canadian. A 100% Canadian owned, operated, and governed service provider can offer a unique “trust factor,” a guaranteed commitment to data privacy and sovereignty that is fully within Canadian jurisdiction.
- Language. A team with a healthy mix of English and French can easily provide bilingual support and operations across Canada, helping ease the integration of cloud services into your organization.
- Partnership. As a boutique service provider, a regional provider can offer customers a flexible and more personal level of support. More than simply a vendor, regional providers have the focus necessary to partner with customers, learn about their business, and provide the support required to ensure their success.
- Gated Access. Regional cloud providers have the luxury of being able to vet and approve all customers, allowing them to operate soundly and ethically. They can be selective about who they partner with. Customers share a multi-tenant infrastructure with like-minded, cloud-oriented businesses.
- Redundancy. Because of their scale, public clouds are often built to minimize cost. In contrast, regional cloud providers can afford to provide higher-quality features, such as N+1 redundancy. The impact of HW issues on availability is significantly reduced, and there are fewer single-points-of-failure. Customers don’t have to double their application infrastructures. Regional cloud providers are in a better position to focus on quality instead of quantity.
- Flexibility
- Infrastructure. In addition to multi-tenant infrastructures, some regional cloud providers offer a variety of dedicated deployment options, bare metal servers, and high-speed connectivity. Customers are provided with higher levels of security, isolation, and performance to meet specific performance or regulatory demands. This makes it easier to tailor deployments according to your private, hybrid, or multi-cloud strategy. Multi-tenant resources enable flexible resource pooling, which can be reconfigured at will without penalties. This provides maximum flexibility and pricing discount without any reserved instance contracts to manage
- Financial. Many hyperscale cloud providers have strict pricing requirements. They might only accept payment in USD, for example, or lock you into specific resources in exchange for a discount. Regional providers, like cloud.ca, give you the best of both worlds by offering flexible pools of resources at discounted pricing.
- Standard components. A degree of vendor lock-in is inevitable with hyperscale cloud providers. Regional providers who endorse open source technologies may instead strive to prevent vendor lock-in. They may also offer standard infrastructure components and tooling, which would make it easier to migrate towards a different infrastructure should the need ever arise.
In contrast to the hyperscale growth of the biggest cloud providers, regional alternatives can partner with a more focused segment of customers to understand their business and accommodate unique requirements. They can let customers trust the security and sovereignty of their data. As workloads continue migrating to the cloud, and as regulations governing data continue to evolve, a growing number of organizations will benefit from the partnership, flexibility, and trust offered by regional providers.
As a fully Canadian cloud infrastructure provider, cloud.ca offers services that are exclusively within Canadian jurisdiction. Depending on our customer’s private, hybrid, or multi-cloud strategies, our infrastructure can support a wide variety of specific business requirements. Contact us to see if your workloads could benefit from cloud.ca, or click here for a free trial.
