What Alternative Clouds Are Good For
InfoWorld, Monday, August 25th, 2025
Cost-effective alternatives are filling gaps left by the hyperscalers in supporting AI workloads, edge computing, private clouds, and more.
Alternative clouds are having a moment. Nearly 75% of organizations are using two or more alternative cloud providers, according to a HostingAdvice.com survey of 500 IT leaders from May 2025. These alternative clouds refer to cloud providers outside the major hyperscalers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, or IBM Cloud.
'You're able to get enterprise-grade hosting from alternative cloud providers,' says Joe Warnimont, senior analyst at HostingAdvice.com. While hyperscalers still dominate in market share, alternative clouds are closing the functionality gap while delivering high availability and lower pricing.