Azure, AWS and Google Cloud all do broadly similar things, but they're not interchangeable in practice — each has a genuine strength and a genuine weakness relative to the others. This guide compares them on the factors that actually matter to a UK business, and explains why increasingly the honest answer is "more than one," managed properly, rather than a single winner.
The three platforms, briefly
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the three dominant public cloud providers globally, and between them they cover the overwhelming majority of UK business cloud infrastructure. Functionally, they overlap heavily — all three offer virtual machines, object storage, managed databases, identity management and networking. Where they genuinely differ is ecosystem fit, specialist strengths, and how naturally each integrates with what a given business already runs.
Head-to-head comparison
| Factor | Azure | AWS | Google Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best existing-ecosystem fit | Microsoft 365 & Windows Server users | Businesses with no existing platform lock-in | Data science & ML-led teams |
| Identity management | Azure AD (Entra ID), often already in place | IAM, standalone | Google IAM, standalone |
| Service breadth | Extensive, Microsoft-integrated | Widest range overall | Narrower, but deep in analytics |
| Data analytics & ML | Strong via Synapse & Fabric | Strong, broad service sprawl | Generally regarded as the strongest native tooling |
| UK SME adoption | High | High, especially tech-native firms | Lower |
Where Azure tends to win
For any UK business already running Microsoft 365, Azure's advantage is structural rather than marginal: identity, licensing and support often already flow through the same Microsoft relationship, and Azure AD (now Entra ID) extends the identity system you're already using into your infrastructure rather than requiring a separate one. Our Azure cloud services page covers migration, storage and management in detail — it's the platform where the bulk of our own accreditation and delivery experience sits, as a certified Microsoft Solutions Partner.
Where AWS tends to win
AWS remains the platform with the broadest overall service catalogue and the deepest bench of specialist third-party tooling built around it, which tends to suit development teams building cloud-native applications without a strong existing Microsoft dependency. Our AWS cloud services page goes into EC2, S3, VPC and IAM management, along with AWS's shared responsibility model for security — which matters more than most businesses initially assume.
Where Google Cloud tends to win
Google Cloud's genuine strength is data: BigQuery for large-scale analytics and Vertex AI for machine learning are generally considered best-in-class, built on the same infrastructure Google uses for its own products. It's rarely the platform a business runs everything on, but it's frequently the right choice for one specific workload. Our Google Cloud services page is deliberately upfront about this — including where we'd advise against defaulting to GCP without a specific reason.
Why many businesses end up running more than one
This is the pattern we see most often in practice: a business with Microsoft 365 and Azure as its core, a development team running specific workloads on AWS, and occasionally a data team using BigQuery for analytics — none of it planned as a coherent multi-cloud strategy from the outset, but arrived at through separate, reasonable decisions over time. That's not a failure. It only becomes a problem when nobody is managing the whole picture consistently, which is exactly what our hybrid and multi-cloud approach is built to address.
Security across all three
All three providers operate a shared responsibility model: they secure the underlying infrastructure, and you're responsible for how you configure identity, network access and data permissions on top of it. The specific failure points differ slightly by platform — Azure misconfigurations tend to cluster around conditional access policy, AWS around S3 bucket permissions and IAM role scope, GCP around service account key management — but the underlying discipline required is the same, and is best handled through a consistent managed cybersecurity service rather than three separately configured approaches.
How to actually decide
Start from what you're already running, not from a platform preference. If Microsoft 365 is central to your business, Azure is very likely the right default for general infrastructure, with AWS or GCP layered in only where a specific workload genuinely calls for it. Treat "which cloud provider" as a workload-by-workload question rather than an all-or-nothing company decision, and you'll generally end up with a more sensible — and cheaper — outcome than committing everything to whichever provider made the most persuasive sales pitch.
