Our Top Cloud Providers of 2026

At DeeperThanBlue, cloud computing has been a core part of our offering for many years. We’ve built strong relationships with the main cloud providers and continue to help our clients enhance business efficiencies, enjoy cost benefits and most importantly claim a competitive advantage over their competitors by adopting the cloud solution that provides a robust platform and service to users.

The last 2 to 3 years have seen an unprecedented impact by generative AI on all cloud platforms. Most vendors have established a Large Language Model (walled garden) platform with tools to integrate enterprise data safely and securely.

According to The Productivity Institute, 70% of businesses in the UK make high or moderate use of cloud computing in 2025. Way back in 2021, Gartner predicted that 85% of enterprises would have a cloud-first strategy by the end of 2025, indicating ongoing adoption momentum. I suspect that this figure was surpassed well ahead of Gartner’s predicted timeline.

The cloud environment itself can be very complicated. Our anecdotal experience working with clients is that there can be up to three hyperscalers in play at one time and, in some cases where geography plays a part, perhaps four or more.

Whether you’re already on your journey to the cloud or you’re planning to implement cloud-computing solutions at some point, you have some big decisions to make. Chief amongst them will be choosing the right cloud provider.

To help make your decision a little easier, here we’ll run through our top four (and some of the alternatives).

Microsoft Azure

Market Share (Q4 2025): 21% (cf. Q4 2023: 18%)

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service in place to help businesses achieve their goals and overcome their challenges. It’s a fully flexible IT solution that provides the freedom to build, deploy and manage applications through a global network. It is a favourite of many Fortune 500 companies, and Microsoft continues to expand its market share across more sectors. Azure is currently available across more than 70 regions worldwide.

Microsoft Azure benefits

The benefits of Microsoft Azure include:

• Scalability on demand – you can change to different service plans based on the needs of your business
• Bespoke industry applications for the likes of healthcare, governments and financial services
• Rapid deployment
• Integration with other Microsoft tools, including M365, Office, Copilot, Power Platform and Fabric
• Enhanced insights
• Automatic updates
• Improved security – Azure Active Directory and its Entra IAM capabilities considerably reduce hacking risks

Key Microsoft Azure Updates:

1. Hybrid and multi‑cloud with Azure Arc: Azure Arc has matured into a central control plane for hybrid and multi‑cloud, allowing organisations to project Azure management, governance and services consistently across on‑premises, edge and other clouds.
2. Advanced AI woven through the Microsoft stack: Azure AI underpins Copilot experiences across Microsoft 365, Dynamics, security and developer tools, giving customers a common platform for building and operating AI‑driven solutions.
3. Edge computing with Azure Edge and Arc: Azure Edge Zones and Arc‑enabled services support more IoT and edge‑computing scenarios, making it easier to run containerised applications and selected Azure services close to devices and users while managing them centrally.
4. Security and compliance at cloud scale: Microsoft Sentinel and the broader Defender and Entra families provide AI‑assisted threat detection, automated response and identity‑centric controls, helping organisations secure complex, hybrid estates.
5. Cloud sustainability and carbon‑negative commitments: Microsoft continues to invest in renewable energy and tools that track the emissions of Azure workloads, supporting its ambition to operate as a carbon‑negative cloud and helping customers meet their own sustainability targets.
6. AI models and LLMs via Azure AI Studio: Azure offers a broad catalogue of foundation models and large language models through Azure AI Studio and related services, enabling customers to build copilots, chatbots and domain‑specific LLM applications with built‑in governance and safety features.
7. Containers and Kubernetes with AKS and Arc: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has become a core runtime for both microservices and AI workloads, while “AKS enabled by Azure Arc” extends a consistent, policy‑driven Kubernetes platform across Azure, on‑premises environments and edge locations.

Google Cloud

Market Share (Q4 2025): 14% (cf. Q4 2023: 12%)

Offered by Google, Google Cloud (previously called Google Cloud Platform, or GCP) includes a number of services that operate over the cloud. They include storage, application development and computing, and they all run on Google hardware. Recently, Google Cloud has made significant strides, leading on AI integration with Gemini and Vertex AI, sustainability, and user-friendly tools. Google Cloud can be accessed by cloud administrators, IT professionals and software developers over a network connection or public internet.

Google continues to evolve its suite of products to ensure it keeps up with the needs of its users and copes with any pressure from competitors.

Google Cloud benefits

Google Cloud has a range of benefits including:

• Outstanding availability and uptime – achieving up to 99.99% uptime
• Uptime monitoring
• Ease of setup
• Fantastic support services
• State-of-the-art security
• The most powerful and advanced frontier generative AI models with Gemini

Another couple of great benefits of Google Cloud to mention are the live migration of virtual machines and its unrivalled throughput. Live migration of virtual machines effectively means that your website will still remain available during system configuration changes, through infrastructure and maintenance upgrades and even in the case of a hardware failure.

Its unrivalled throughput means Google Cloud processes and transfers data between two locations faster than any other provider, ensuring your website and applications are always running at the speed your users expect.

Key Google Cloud Updates:

1. Advanced AI with Vertex AI and Gemini: Google Cloud has deepened its AI capabilities through Vertex AI, combining access to Gemini and partner models with tooling such as BigQuery ML to make AI and generative AI more accessible to organisations of all sizes.
2. Simplified, AI‑ready data analytics with BigQuery: BigQuery continues to evolve as a unified analytics and lakehouse engine, adding performance improvements, new formats and generative‑AI features that simplify data preparation, analysis and insight generation.
3. Sustainability as a core design principle: Google Cloud backs its long‑standing clean‑energy commitments with more efficient data‑centre designs and customer‑facing tools that help measure and reduce the environmental impact of cloud workloads.
4. Security built around modern threats: Google is strengthening its security portfolio with a greater “secure‑by‑design” emphasis, using AI‑assisted threat detection and expanded compliance tooling to help protect modern, cloud‑native and AI‑driven applications.
5. Global infrastructure expansion: Google Cloud continues to add and expand regions and zones to improve coverage and reduce latency, giving customers more options for data residency and performance‑sensitive workloads.
6. AI models and LLMs through Vertex AI Studio: An expanding model catalogue in Vertex AI Studio, including Gemini and third‑party or open‑source models, enables organisations to build chatbots, copilots and industry‑specific LLM solutions on a managed platform.
7. Containers and Kubernetes with GKE: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) has been enhanced for AI‑scale deployments, with features that simplify running GPU/TPU‑accelerated, containerised training and inference, positioning GKE as the backbone for modern, cloud‑native and AI workloads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Market Share (Q4 2025): 28% (cf. Q4 2023: 32%)

Amazon was one of the first out of the gate with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has led to it being the first choice for many big and small companies when it comes to the time to convert from data centres to cloud computing. In 2026, Amazon continues to lead the cloud market, expanding its global presence and enhancing its service offerings. AWS now operates across 33 regions and over 100 availability zones worldwide.

As the largest cloud service provider globally, AWS has over 240 fully featured services including compute, storage and database.

AWS benefits

There are a number of benefits of choosing AWS, including:

• Ease of use: The interface, called the AWS Management Console, is extremely user-friendly and easy to use. It also provides access to a wide number of applications and services.
  When you sign up to use AWS, you’re essentially renting Amazon’s infrastructure, which makes it simple to deploy programs, software and entire IT ecosystems in a timely manner. So, whether you’re looking for a reliable Content Delivery Network or Hadoop Cluster, AWS will have you covered.
• A diverse array of tools: First starting with cloud storage and computing, AWS has now expanded, now offering more than 240 tools and services. This includes database, software, mobile, analytics, and networking.
• Unlimited server capacity: There’s basically no IT-based need that AWS can’t handle. It also means you can grow as you wish, without worrying about service disruption.

Additional AWS benefits include:

• Cost-effectiveness
• Enhanced productivity
• Continued innovation
• Market-leading security

Key AWS updates

1. Local zones and low‑latency delivery: AWS has expanded its Local Zones and AWS Global Accelerator coverage, bringing services closer to end‑users and improving performance for latency‑sensitive workloads in sectors such as gaming, healthcare and media.
2. Graviton and Trainium for efficient compute: New generations of Graviton processors, alongside Trainium and Inferentia accelerators, offer better price‑performance for general workloads as well as large‑scale AI training and inference.
3. Richer AI and ML services with Bedrock: AWS has enhanced services such as Amazon SageMaker, Polly, Lex and Rekognition, while Amazon Bedrock continues to grow as a curated “model garden” of foundation and generative‑AI models delivered as fully managed APIs.
4. EKS and Kubernetes for modern apps: Amazon EKS remains the backbone for container‑based modernisation, with recent updates simplifying cluster operations, strengthening security and scaling GPU‑intensive AI workloads on managed Kubernetes.
5. Hybrid cloud with Outposts and partners: AWS Outposts, VMware Cloud on AWS and Local Zones provide a more consistent hybrid experience, allowing organisations to run AWS infrastructure and services on‑premises or closer to users while retaining a single operational model.
6. Security and data protection by design: Improvements to services such as AWS Shield and Amazon Macie, along with broader identity, networking and observability features, help customers strengthen protection against attacks and improve discovery of sensitive data.
7. New regions and sustainability focus: AWS continues to add new regions and Availability Zones, coupled with more transparent energy and carbon reporting, enabling customers to align cloud adoption with sustainability and data‑residency goals.

IBM Cloud

Market Share (Q4 2025): 2% (cf. Q4 2023: 2.5%)

Similar to AWS and Google Cloud, IBM Cloud is a digital platform that enables users to migrate their existing infrastructure to a virtual environment. IBM Cloud favours a simple approach without any need to alter infrastructure or internal systems when journeying to the cloud – this makes it easy to switch from other providers or to move from physical infrastructure to digital operations.

It’s for this reason that so many businesses opt for IBM Cloud as a vital cog in their digital transformation.

IBM Cloud spans 10 regions across North and South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific; these regions contain 31 availability zones.

IBM Cloud Benefits

IBM Cloud has a number of benefits. They include:

• Configure and deploy high-performance cloud servers for your application
• Control how you pay for your service to suit your financial pace
• Fully open source technology with a community that evolves alongside it
• The freedom to choose your ideal cloud infrastructure
• Effortlessly make your apps smarter with IBM’s watsonx AI integration
• Deploy VMware workloads to the cloud for a seamless hybrid cloud experience, leveraging both virtual and/or bare metal configurations

Key IBM Cloud Updates:

1. Hybrid and multi‑cloud built on OpenShift: IBM has strengthened its hybrid cloud capabilities, using Red Hat OpenShift and related tooling to provide a consistent application platform across IBM Cloud, customer datacentres and other providers.
2. Deeper AI integration with watsonx: watsonx is increasingly embedded across IBM Cloud services, giving enterprises tools to build, tune and govern AI models and agents with a strong focus on explainability and control.
3. Industry‑specific solutions for regulated markets: IBM has expanded its portfolio of solutions for industries such as financial services, healthcare and the public sector, combining IBM Cloud, OpenShift and watsonx into packaged offerings tailored to regulatory and compliance requirements.
4. Security, compliance and governance first: Enhancements to IBM Cloud’s security, compliance and observability capabilities support customers operating in highly regulated environments who need strong controls over data, workloads and AI models.
5. Streamlined partner and customer engagement: Updated partner programmes, support models and self‑service tooling are intended to make it easier for customers and partners to adopt IBM Cloud and hybrid solutions at scale.
6. AI models and LLMs for enterprise data: IBM is extending watsonx with capabilities for data fabric, vector search and model lifecycle management, enabling enterprises to deploy large language models against governed data across hybrid and multi‑cloud landscapes.
7. Containers and Kubernetes via OpenShift: OpenShift‑based Kubernetes is the default runtime for modern workloads on IBM Cloud, providing a consistent container platform for both traditional applications and AI services across cloud, on‑premises and edge environments.

Alternative Cloud Providers

The Big Four are not the only cloud service providers. In addition, there are some niche players in the market and ones to consider if geography or data sovereignty are key. These may not have the full functionality of Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, but might be worth a look if you are seeking specialist services.

1. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): Oracle has made significant investments in its cloud infrastructure, focusing on enterprise-grade performance and security.
2. Alibaba Cloud: As the leading cloud provider in Asia, Alibaba Cloud has expanded its global presence and improved its AI and big data capabilities.
3. DigitalOcean: Known for its simplicity and developer-friendly approach, DigitalOcean has expanded its services to cater to small and medium-sized businesses.

Choosing the right cloud platform for your business

Cloud computing is essential for your business to remain productive, efficient and cost-effective, and to ensure you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. So choosing the right cloud platform is a key decision to get right.

Consider factors such as:

• Specific service offerings and their alignment with your needs
• Global presence and data centre locality
• Pricing models and cost-effectiveness
• Integration capabilities with existing systems
• Security and compliance features
• Support for technologies like AI, IoT, and edge computing

It’s not a decision to take lightly. At DeeperThanBlue, we have over 20 years of experience assisting organisations with their digital transformation strategies. We continue to leverage our extensive experience in cloud services to guide organisations through their digital transformation journeys. Our expertise in cloud strategy development, hosting implementation, and migration execution ensures a successful cloud adoption for businesses of all sizes.

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