Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Microsoft, Google or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Recommended for small businesses of up to twenty-five users, Microsoft 365 is an entry-level cloud option with many benefits.

Microsoft 365 is one of the world’s most popular cloud solutions for small business. Offering the ability to access your company’s files and data from any device, your workforce will enjoy using the Microsoft applications they know and love with the additional advantage of being able to access them from anywhere over an internet connection.

✓  Most extensive hybrid capabilities.

✓  Integration with Microsoft Cloud.

✓  Enhanced developer capabilities.

✓  Preconfigured IoT integration suite.

Microsoft Office 365 is what is called SaaS, or Software as a Service. Azure goes beyond SaaS to become IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service), providing the operating system, computing power and network from which all necessary components are hosted.

What does this mean for your business? While Office 365 is a managed solution that is more than enough for many small offices, some may have the need for a more customized approach, more server power and more storage. Azure provides a wide range of integrated services that can accommodate a multitude of operating systems, languages, tools and application development capabilities.

With enhanced virtual capacity, Azure is the choice of many when migrating to a cloud-based infrastructure, as it allows for customized business applications and extended mobile app support. This allows businesses to host complex third-party applications as a service to their workforce and customer base outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.

✓  Fully integrated suite that empowers people to work anywhere, any time.

✓  Collaborate in new ways and focus time on impactful work.

✓  Get teams working together - faster, smarter but not harder

✓  Improve communications beyond email

✓  Centralise and share assets easily

✓  Create intranets to collaborate on team projects

✓  Reduce costs whilst increasing productivity

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) brings together a set of integrated tools that work seamlessly together, making it easy to create your digital workplace - and become more collaborative, innovative and productive.

It streamlines authentication, asset protection, and operational control in one easy to use console. Time spent provisioning goes from hours to minutes. Predefined content detectors make features like data loss prevention (DLP) easy to deploy. The Google Admin app lets administrators manage their account on the go - everything from adding users, resetting passwords, viewing audit logs, and more.

For the most demanding environments, admins have access to advanced controls, auditing capabilities, and proactive security recommendations to minimize risk. Google Workspace OpenID Connect provides one comprehensive identity solution in the cloud, including SSO, provisioning, multi-factor authentication, directory administration, endpoint management, and more.

✓  Extensive, reliable, and secure global cloud infrastructure.

✓  Over 175 fully featured services for a wide range of technologies, industries, and use cases.

✓  Latest technologies to experiment and innovate more quickly.

✓  Core infrastructure built to satisfy the security requirements for the military, global banks, and other high-sensitivity organizations.

✓  Pay-as-you-go pricing, unique for each service.

AWS is a platform consisting of a variety of cloud computing services offered by Amazon. The most popular of these services include Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

Instead of building an in-house data centre, or leasing general purpose servers from traditional data centres, the costs of resource provisioning on AWS reflect actual usage, not reserved capacity. The service in question is also a factor in billing--pricing varies based on the individual product and storage type.

In addition to the aforementioned EC2 and S3 services, other services exist in the AWS portfolio. CloudFront, a content-delivery network (CDN), mirrors resources at "edge locations" to improve page loading time. Relational Database Service (RDS) is a scalable database server that supports MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as Amazon's own Aurora implementation of MySQL. Similarly, DynamoDB offers scalable NoSQL database support. Elastic Beanstalk allows users to quickly deploy and manage applications in the cloud from preconfigured container images.

AWS also offers specialized resources that are applicable to specific use cases. Video stored on S3 can be easily transcoded for mobile devices using Elastic Transcoder, and for any process not yet automatable simple tasks can be completed by remote workers in Mechanical Turk--though, this is more crowd computing than cloud computing. Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service delivered through AWS, allowing businesses to scale to thousands of customer support agents.