The three hyperscale cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — collectively control over sixty-five percent of the global cloud market. Each is a complete, capable platform. Choosing between them requires a systematic evaluation against your specific context, not a benchmark comparison of raw feature counts.
AWS is the default choice for organisations without strong Microsoft or Google dependencies. It has the broadest service catalogue, the largest partner ecosystem, and the deepest penetration in the startup and scale-up community. If your team's cloud skills were built in the wild, they are probably AWS skills. For new cloud deployments without legacy constraints, AWS is the lowest-risk starting point.
Azure is the natural choice for organisations running significant Microsoft workloads — Active Directory, Office 365, SQL Server, .NET applications. The integration between on-premise Microsoft infrastructure and Azure services is genuinely superior to what the other providers offer. For enterprises with a heavy Microsoft stack, Azure is often the pragmatically correct choice regardless of any other comparison.
GCP is the choice for organisations whose competitive advantage is in data and machine learning. Google's data infrastructure — BigQuery, Dataflow, Vertex AI — is legitimately best-in-class. For data-intensive workloads, analytics platforms, and ML pipelines, GCP often delivers better performance at lower cost than its competitors.
Secondary factors that often tip the decision: GCP and Azure offer better sustained use discounts for predictable workloads. AWS has more availability zones globally, which matters for global enterprises with strict latency requirements. GCP's Kubernetes offering (GKE) is the most mature, reflecting its origin as the platform that invented Kubernetes. Azure's compliance certification coverage is the broadest for regulated industries in India, including RBI and SEBI-specific certifications.
For most Indian enterprises, the practical recommendation is to standardise on one primary cloud — whichever aligns best with your existing skills and workload profile — and treat multi-cloud as a deliberate exception rather than a default policy.