In the cloud space, Amazon’s AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure have become household names, and sometimes they are referred as the “big three” in the cloud computing and cloud services industry. But, are the services offered by the “big three” suitable for your needs? You will need to compare them on cost, feature sets, performance, and services to determine your choice.

While these “big three” cloud computing and cloud storage service providers promise high performance, not all of them can deliver. You might have heard the news that these “big three” experiencing outages on a regular intervals. If you choose such a public cloud that consistently experiences outages, and you’ll pay the price.

Google Drive

Starting off with the industry giant, Google Drive is a cloud storage service offered by Google, which allows users to store files online. Stored files can be accessed online from anywhere, anytime. Not only you can store data you created or sent to you, Google Drive also offers access to a number of web applications for free, including spreadsheets, documents, presentations, drawings and forms. Optionally, stored files can be shared with others, allowing collaboration.

Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft’s Office 365 is a subscription based cloud service that offers access to a whole lot of Office applications, such as business email service hosted by Exchange Online, web conferencing by Lync, OneDrive cloud storage and Skype. Microsoft Office 365 traps clients by offering the first year for free, betting that companies will continue to pay for the services after the first 12 months service expires, as it would be a headache for the companies to move to another provider or cancel the service. Such negative option offering could have its own backlash, as the data would be taken hostage until the client pays to continue using the service.

Amazon AWS – S3

Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a collection of cloud computing services offered by Amazon. These services operate from 12 geographical regions across the world. Its storage service is Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as “Amazon S3”. Amazon pricing might look dirt cheap at a glance, however, when you look deeper into the pricing plans, you will quickly discover that it charges you a base storage fee, plus for “get request” and “put request” (above certain amount of data), meaning the fee quickly adds up.

Compare	Google Drive	Office 365	Amazon S3	Backup Everything
Data Location	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	UK
Pricing	Free for up to 15 GB	Free for 1st year, Negative option*	Storage plus access fee	No hidden fees
Cloud Storage	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Cloud Backup	No	No	No	Yes
Automated Service	No	No	No	Yes
File Sharing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Agentless	No	No	No	Yes
Support	No or limited	No or limited	No or limited	Yes, full

* MS Office 365 is offered free for the first 12 months, and data is locked until you start paying going forward.

Cloud Backup Vs Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is just storage, meaning, there is no automated backup running in the background. You will need to move the data yourself to the cloud. However, cloud backup is more than just storage; it doesn’t need any human intervention. Just set it and forget it!

Cloud backup companies create copies of all the files in your system (scheduled periodically or automatically, as per your set up) for redundancy and disaster recovery.  They automatically maintain version ing when files are changed or modified in any manner. On the other hand, cloud storage providers require the user to upload the file after any edits are made.

Cloud backup is designed to automatically protect your files, ensuring complete privacy and security along with storage. Cloud backup services are not merely focused on syncing and accessing files.  You can backup files from a number of systems using agent-based or agentless backup options. You can encrypt and decrypt your files at source or destination to ensure security during transmission of the files. You can compress and decompress your files using advanced algorithms that ensure that your data does not get corrupted during transmission or storage.

Backup Everything

Industry leading company BackupEverything (BE) provides automated cloud backup services for affordable and pre-determined prices. BE is not a location dependent service and its fee structure is the same no matter where in the world you are from. BE provide s scalable space, meaning your backup space can be scaled up or down based on your needs. It also provides automated and scheduled backups, file versioning, with data encrypted during transfer and storage. BE does not charge data retrieval fees, it only charges for amount of data stored in its servers.

For a comprehensive and reliable service, it is prudent that the end user chooses services from an independent cloud backup company, like BackupEverything to backup their sensitive data. This way, the user will know their actual cost, where the data is being backed up, and get the best bespoke service according to the Service Level Agreement (SLA) executed.