Which cloud provider is right for my business: Azure, AWS or Huawei Cloud?

All three are credible, enterprise-grade platforms, and for most SME workloads, the "right" choice depends more on your existing technology ecosystem, specific compliance needs, and cost structure than any fundamental difference in reliability or capability between them.

Microsoft Azure

The natural fit for businesses already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft 365, Windows Server, Active Directory. Azure integrates most seamlessly with these existing Microsoft tools, often the path of least resistance and lowest additional complexity for a Microsoft-centric business, and offers extensive enterprise application support.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The largest and most mature cloud platform globally by market share, with an enormous breadth of services and a large, established ecosystem of tools and third-party integrations. AWS often suits businesses with more complex, custom application development needs, or those wanting the widest possible range of specific specialised services to choose from.

Huawei Cloud

Particularly relevant for South African businesses given its established in-country presence, Huawei was among the first hyperscale providers with local data centre infrastructure in Johannesburg, offering genuine local data residency, directly relevant to POPIA considerations, and typically lower latency for South African users than routing to more distant international regions. Huawei Cloud has also made substantial regional investment, including local partner development.

The Data Residency Question Often Matters Most

For South African businesses with POPIA compliance considerations, or for public-sector and regulated-industry clients where data residency is frequently a hard requirement rather than a preference, confirming exactly where a provider's regional data centre is physically located, and choosing that specific region deliberately, often matters more than the brand name itself. All three providers offer options with data residency considerations worth understanding for your specific situation, ask directly rather than assuming.

Cost Comparison Isn't Straightforward

Pricing structures differ meaningfully across providers and across specific service types, a workload cheaper on one platform may be more expensive on another depending on exactly what resources it uses. A genuine cost comparison needs to be done for your specific, actual workload requirements, not a generic headline price comparison that rarely reflects real-world usage patterns.

You're Not Necessarily Locked Into One Choice

Many businesses run genuinely multi-cloud, or hybrid, environments, different workloads on different platforms based on what best suits each specific need, rather than committing every single workload to one provider. This adds some management complexity but avoids over-dependence on any single vendor.

What We'd Actually Recommend Considering

Start with your existing technology investment (heavy Microsoft shop, Azure is the natural fit), your specific data residency and compliance requirements, and get an actual cost estimate for your real workloads rather than deciding based on brand reputation alone.

Our Approach

We work across Azure, AWS and Huawei Cloud, and recommend based on your specific technology ecosystem, compliance needs and realistic cost projections, rather than pushing whichever platform we happen to have the deepest existing relationship with regardless of fit.