How to choose a cloud provider
AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer enterprise-grade infrastructure — but the right choice depends on your team's skills, compliance requirements, existing tooling, and total cost of ownership over 3–5 years.
Start with your constraints
Before comparing feature lists, document non-negotiables: data residency (GDPR, sector regulations), required integrations (Active Directory, SAP, etc.), and whether you need hybrid or full cloud.
Evaluate on five axes
- Team familiarity — the cheapest cloud is the one your engineers already know.
- Workload fit — analytics-heavy vs. transactional apps favour different services.
- Compliance certifications — ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA where applicable.
- Migration path — lift-and-shift vs. refactor changes cost and timeline.
- Long-term cost model — reserved instances, spot, and egress fees add up.
When to go multi-cloud
Most mid-size businesses do well with one primary provider plus hybrid on-premise. Multi-cloud adds complexity — only worth it for specific redundancy or acquisition-driven requirements.