82% of businesses believe hyperscalers overcharge but remain wary of switching provider

Civo has published the result of its research on cloud use in business. The research has revealed that the vast majority of businesses believe that large hyperscale cloud providers are overcharging while also pursuing a narrative that their cloud offerings are low cost. However, it is concerns around security and uptime – not cloud lock-in – that stops them from switching providers.

The hyperscale public cloud providers of Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure have seen their revenue grow between 25 and 30% year-on-year in recent years, a trend that is predicted to continue for at least the next few years. However, businesses that use these hyperscale cloud providers find their costs soar, and almost none believe they live up to the continued narrative that their services are low-cost.

Running counter to popular opinion, it is not cloud lock-in that keeps businesses using the big three hyperscalers. The biggest reasons to stay with AWS, Azure and GCP is the perception they are safer and more stable with better uptime.

The top reasons cited for staying with the big three were:

• 51% believe the smaller cloud providers are less secure

• 47% believe they will suffer more outages

• 37% say it’s more convenient

Only 17% say they are locked into the technology of their cloud provider.

Convenience comes at a price

Of the businesses surveyed, 82% think the big three hyperscalers should reduce their charges and 81% say that they try to give the impression they are low cost. 68% of all respondents went a step further and believe the perception that cloud is cheaper is misleading.

This comes across the background that 74% of businesses have seen their cloud costs increase over the past 12 months, with an average increase of cost amongst these businesses of 66%.

Mark Boost, CEO of Civo commented, “Our research uncovered that a vast majority of customers think they are overpaying for their cloud service, and this is driven by a misperception that businesses are more secure and stable with the largest public cloud providers. 

“However, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all suffered high profile outages in the last year**. Users of Amazon alone have suffered 27 outages in the last 12 months***. Size is clearly no guarantee of uptime when it comes to cloud providers.

“The additional complexity involved in securing public cloud endpoints using the hyperscalers means they are far more likely to be left insecure, and this is evidenced by the number of data breaches caused by simple misconfigurations of services like Amazon S3 or Microsoft’s Azure Container Instances.

“Bigger is rarely better when it comes to choosing a cloud provider. Hyperscalers have lots of unnecessary complexity and more moving parts in their offerings, increasing the chance of issues or bugs for users. In addition, the footprint of hyperscalers across an unwieldly amount of products and regions creates a far greater attack surface for bad actors to exploit.” 

Boost is also co-Founder of Bulletproof cyber security and launched Defense.com SaaS security offerings. He added:

“From my early roots in cyber security, Civo has always prioritised security, with Bulletproof proactively protecting Civo’s systems. Providers like Civo are part of a new breed of providers who are looking to challenge hyperscaler business models and demonstrate that there are fast, secure and reliable alternatives out there, at a much cheaper price too.”