The Top 10 Public Cloud Storage Services Worldwide

Wasabi offers Hot Cloud Storage, a unified and straightforward cloud object storage solution. Unlike many services that segregate storage into various tiers, Wasabi presents a single tier of secure, low-latency storage. This storage speed is comparable to frequent-access tiers provided by major hyperscalers, but is priced similarly to more affordable archive storage options. This positions Wasabi’s storage as a suitable solution for diverse use cases, including offsite backups, active archives, and hybrid cloud storage.

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage offers features tailored for backup and recovery, such as ransomware protection through immutable buckets and swift hot cloud storage for enhanced RTO/RPO. For media archiving, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage allows for instant access to archived content without incurring extra egress costs. It also supports virtual editing through its low-latency storage. Additionally, Wasabi offers solutions for surveillance video storage, enabling quick cloud integration for on-premises VMS and providing disaster-resilient storage options.

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage is compatible with AWS S3 and IAM APIs, making it well-suited to multi-cloud strategies or as an immediate replacement in cloud storage designs. With 13 global storage regions, Wasabi provides enterprise-grade cloud storage, allowing large organizations and MSPs to oversee multiple storage accounts effortlessly with the Wasabi Account Control Manager. Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage doesn’t charge additional fees for egress or API calls, offering a predictable pricing structure.

Dropbox is a collaborative platform that ensures all content, whether for work or creative projects, is easily accessible and organized. Trusted by over 500,000 teams, Dropbox provides a secure and adaptable workspace, combining cloud storage, file sharing, productivity tools, and collaborative functionalities in a single platform.

With Dropbox, users can integrate their existing workflows, allowing for a streamlined experience. It also offers a unique feature for viewing creative projects, facilitating cooperative work from anywhere and supporting both local and cloud file workflows. In addition to content management, Dropbox has introduced eSignatures for securely sending and requesting document signatures. Files can be stored, accessed, and backed up from various devices, with changes synchronizing across the user’s account. The platform also allows direct creation and editing of work, including cloud content and Microsoft Office files, reducing the need to toggle between applications. The desktop version offers smart content suggestions and a consolidated workspace that enhances team interactions.

Dropbox extends its capabilities with a range of features to augment user experience. These include Dropbox Paper, a tool for collaborative document creation and project organization, and robust file sharing capabilities with password protection, link expiration, and download permissions. Additionally, users can safeguard their files against unintended modifications, deletions, or external threats and recover any file for up to 30 days.

Azure is Microsoft’s comprehensive cloud storage service that offers various storage options tailored to different business needs. The platform delivers storage solutions for object, block, and file data, designed to uphold high standards of performance, availability, and security, all while centralizing data management.

The Azure Disk Storage platform provides durable block storage suitable for business-critical applications. Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage offer massively scalable and secure options for cloud-native workloads, archives, and high-performance computing. For those seeking enterprise-grade file sharing, Azure Files offers a simple and secure solution.

Azure also addresses hybrid storage requirements. Azure File Sync allows for hybrid cloud file shares, facilitating on-premises data caching. Azure Stack Edge serves as a cloud storage gateway, ensuring efficient data transfer between the cloud and edge locations. Finally, for businesses needing swift and cost-effective data transfer solutions, Azure Data Box presents appliances and tools tailored to that purpose.

AWS’ storage services are utilized by millions to enhance business agility, manage costs, and foster innovation. AWS offers a comprehensive portfolio of storage solutions for data storage, access, protection, and analysis. With Cloud Storage on AWS, businesses can access their stored assets quickly and easily, which aids in quickening market entry and minimizes both over-provisioning and complicated capacity planning.

AWS’ storage services are designed with an emphasis on cost-effectiveness. By leveraging managed services, businesses can significantly reduce infrastructure maintenance costs and optimize their storage expenses based on the urgency and frequency of data access. A standout feature of AWS’ cloud storage is its robust data security. The service claims a durability of 99.99% and ensures data resilience across multiple Availability Zones. Additionally, AWS provides options ranging from precise data restoration to extensive recovery across both its cloud platform and on-premises setups.

For those looking to derive more from their data, AWS offers a selection of tools suitable for big data analytics, AI, ML, high-performance computing, and media processing. AWS’ storage products encompass services like Amazon S3 for scalable object storage, Amazon EFS for serverless file systems, and AWS DataSync for efficient data transfers, among others. Whether migrating applications, building data lakes, or developing cloud-native applications, AWS storage services cater to diverse use cases, ensuring data security, accessibility, and optimal performance.

Google Cloud Storage is a managed service designed to store unstructured data, allowing users to store and retrieve data seamlessly. The platform provides features like Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) and Autoclass, helping users optimize costs through smart object placement across various storage classes. This is further complemented by its ability to automatically transition objects to colder storage classes based on their last access time, without any additional fees.

Google Cloud Storage offers robust replication capabilities, including dual-region buckets that span an extensive number of regions. These buckets offer nine regions across three continents, ensuring a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of zero. This means that during outages, data remains accessible from an alternate region without the need for a manual failover process. Additionally, with turbo replication, businesses can achieve a 15-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Google Cloud Storage streamlines the data transfer process with its Storage Transfer Service, offering a fast and scalable solution. Additionally, the Transfer Appliance enables offline data transfers by allowing users to ship a storage server from their data center for data upload.

Once data is in Cloud Storage, users can leverage Google Cloud’s analytics and machine learning tools, such as BigQuery, Dataproc, and Vertex AI, to extract valuable insights. Google Cloud Storage provides default security settings and offers users advanced controls to protect their data from breaches. This includes features like retention policies, object holds, encryption options, and uniform bucket-level access.

IBM Cloud Storage Services offer scalable, security-focused solutions tailored to both traditional and cloud-native workloads. Users can select from a range of storage types, including object, block, and file storage, adjusting capacity and performance according to changing needs. Importantly, users are billed only for the storage they use.

IBM Cloud Storage is comprised of multiple tools. Object Storage is an advanced platform tailored for electronic records retention, focusing on regulatory compliance and robust data encryption. IBM Cloud Block Storage promises high performance, offering up to 16 TB of storage equipped with snapshot and replication features, IBM Cloud File Storage is an NFS-based solution, scalable and flash-backed, offering both endurance and customizable performance provisioning tiers.

With IBM Cloud Storage, users benefit from tiered pricing options and a complimentary private network, with the added advantage of data mobility between IBM data centers. Security stands paramount, with options like BYOK or IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services for key management and a commitment to FIPS 140-2 Level 4 hardware standards. IBM also provides governance tools, allowing users to manage and enforce storage policies across their cloud environments. Moreover, IBM Cloud Object Storage guarantees a high level of data durability at 99.99%, ensuring data resiliency and built-in fault tolerance.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers a range of high-performance computing and budget-friendly cloud storage solutions. Catering to diverse storage needs, Oracle Cloud offers on-demand local, object, file, block, and archive storage. To facilitate the secure migration of data to the cloud, it provides a storage gateway and a data transfer service.

OCI storage has a strong focus on high performance, scalability, and durability. It accommodates block volumes up to 1 PB, file storage up to 8 EB, and local NVMe up to 2 TB. Both Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage and Archive Storage ensure dependable data storage, backed by a solid availability service level agreement. Particularly, the OCI Block Volume stands out for delivering a consistent, low-latency performance, reaching up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/sec per volume, with options to dynamically scale performance. For tasks demanding high performance, it can achieve up to 700,000 IOPS and 9,600 MB/sec throughput per host.

Security remains a priority in Oracle Cloud’s design. Its architecture emphasizes tenant isolation, least privilege access, and data encryption at rest. Integration with Oracle Identity and Access Management further streamlines access and permissions management. Among the storage products offered, Object Storage allows native data storage which is beneficial for data consolidation. Oracle File Storage delivers a fully managed Network File System (NFS) that scales automatically up to 8 exabytes, ensuring data availability through multiway replication. Local NVMe SSD storage, ideal for high-throughput tasks, provides up to 51.2 TB capacity per instance with notable low latency. Archive Storage is designed for long-term data storage at lower cost than Object Storage, while Storage Gateway bridges local file systems with Oracle Cloud’s Object Storage.

Box offers a secure cloud storage solution, ideal for storing and sharing various file types, including presentations, design documents, videos, and photos. It provides a collaborative environment that eliminates version-control issues, ensuring that multiple users can work on any file type. Accessible from any device, Box guarantees that users can engage productively from any location, with the added benefit of an online backup and data accessibility from virtually anywhere.

Beyond storage, Box enhances real-time collaboration by enabling users to upload files and folders, share links for collaborative efforts, and establish permissions per user. The platform automatically saves earlier file versions, offering a safety net against unintended changes or deletions. Box also offers a range of in-built security features; it encrypts documents both in transit and at rest, while the Admin Console facilitates detailed management of files and folders, allowing admins to set classifications, sharing parameters, and access controls. Additionally, Box enables users to set auto-expiration and password protection on shared links or to remove a link when it becomes redundant.

In terms of data residency, Box caters to international requirements, enabling data storage across geographies such as North America, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. The “Box Zones” feature ensures content is stored in a chosen region, elevating privacy and control standards. Box’s versatility is further highlighted by its compatibility with over 1,400 app integrations, including Microsoft 365, Okta, and Google Workspace. This ensures businesses can maintain their preferred productivity tools while benefiting from Box’s unified, secure content layer.

DigitalOcean Spaces Object Storage offers S3-compatible object storage complemented by an integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN). This solution is designed to facilitate easy, reliable, and affordable data storage and delivery, and can host static web assets, video streaming, software delivery, and file sharing, as well as storing backup files and logs and automatically scaling storage capacity as required.

Prioritizing performance, Spaces is tailored for applications demanding high requests per second (RPS), with a peak performance reaching 1500 RPS per client IP address. It also offers a built-in CDN that can enhance web page load times, optimize performance, minimize bandwidth, and reduce infrastructure expenses by caching content across various globally dispersed servers. The user experience is streamlined; users can upload multiple files either through drag-and-drop or API, and managing content is straightforward with a user-friendly control panel. Additionally, The platform’s compatibility with the extensive S3 ecosystem ensures users can effortlessly manage their Spaces Object Storage.

DigitalOcean Spaces also offers a range of security features. Data transfers employ HTTPS encryption, and users have the flexibility to set files as public or private. Additionally, there’s the option for Quick Share links with set expiration times. Custom subdomain mapping is possible, secured either with a user’s existing SSL certificate or a complimentary Let’s Encrypt certificate. Finally, cross-domain security concerns are alleviated by an inbuilt cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) rules manager in the Cloud UI or the S3-compatible API.

NetApp provides data protection solutions that facilitate that back up and restoration of data from on-site locations to the public cloud. NetApp also enables businesses to consolidate datastores and set up disaster recovery environments across one or multiple public clouds. For data compliance and governance, NetApp ensures data storage in specific cloud locations to adhere to sovereignty, security, and compliance standards, enhancing data visibility and providing protection against ransomware threats.

With NetApp’s data tiering, businesses can minimize physical space, infrastructure management, and costs by automating the transfer of rarely accessed “cold” data from on-site locations to cloud storage. The solution’s hybrid workload feature integrates on-premises and public cloud storage, supporting enterprise applications. This integration aims to cut down on system administration expenses, ensure data protection, and simplify operations with unified management across the hybrid cloud. For businesses adopting DevOps practices, NetApp accelerates application development within a hybrid, multi-cloud environment, facilitating quicker application releases and seamless support for continuous integration and deployment without the need for retooling. The platform’s cloud bursting capability allows for the temporary transfer of data or its clones from on-site to the cloud or between different clouds, catering to dynamic workload flexibility and data processing requirements.

NetApp offers protection against ransomware attacks by upholding strict cloud data compliance and retention standards, ensuring business continuity, and safeguarding crucial cloud access and login details. The solution also supports the development of cloud-native applications, delivering scalable, resilient cloud applications that harness managed services fully. With NetApp, businesses can deliver persistent Kubernetes datastores, provide on-demand environments to DevOps teams without immediate capital expenditures, and integrate containerized apps with traditional workloads within the same storage infrastructure.