Search for a comparison of the three major cloud providers and you will find feature matrices running to hundreds of rows. They are accurate and largely useless, because the decision almost never turns on whether one provider has a managed service the others lack. For the workloads most Indian MSMEs run, all three are capable.
The decision turns on things the feature tables do not capture: what your team already knows, what you are already paying for, and who you can call when something breaks at 11 PM.
We work primarily on Azure, so treat what follows with that in mind. The framework below is the one we actually use, including the cases where the answer is not Azure.
This is the single strongest signal and the one most often ignored.
If your business already runs Microsoft 365 for email and documents, and your identity lives in Entra ID, Azure is the path of least resistance. Single sign-on works without extra integration, licensing can often be consolidated, and your existing Microsoft partner relationship carries over. The same logic runs in reverse: if your team has spent five years building on AWS, moving to Azure for a marginal price advantage is usually a bad trade.
If you use Google Workspace heavily and your team is comfortable there, GCP has a similar coherence advantage, though the Workspace-to-GCP integration is generally less tight than the Microsoft 365-to-Azure equivalent.
The honest version: existing investment is not a sunk cost fallacy here. Integration effort, retraining and migration risk are real costs that usually exceed the pricing delta between providers.
In Bengaluru and the other major Indian tech centres, all three skill sets are available. Outside them, the picture is uneven, and AWS and Azure skills are generally easier to find than GCP.
This matters more than it sounds. A cloud platform your one competent engineer understands is worth more than a technically superior platform nobody on staff can debug. If you are a twenty-person company outside a metro, hiring reality should weigh heavily.
The same question applies to partners. If you plan to work with a managed service provider rather than hire in-house, check which platforms your candidate partners actually specialise in before picking a platform.
Setting aside the marketing, there are a few real distinctions worth knowing.
AWS has the broadest service catalogue and the longest track record. If you need something unusual, AWS most likely has a managed service for it. The tradeoff is complexity: the console is dense, the pricing model has many dimensions, and small teams often find it overwhelming without help.
Azure integrates most naturally with Microsoft environments, which describes a large share of Indian MSMEs. Its hybrid story, running some workloads on-premises and some in cloud under common management, is well developed. Its licensing benefits can be substantial if you already hold Windows Server or SQL Server licences, though the rules are genuinely complicated and worth checking rather than assuming.
GCP is strong in data analytics and machine learning, and its networking is well regarded. It is the smallest of the three by market share, which shows up as a thinner partner ecosystem and fewer engineers with deep experience.
None of these are decisive on their own. They become decisive in combination with your specific situation.
All three operate datacentre regions in India. If your business handles personal data and you want it to stay in country, all three can accommodate that, but it is a configuration choice rather than a default. You need to select Indian regions explicitly and confirm that backups, replicas and any managed services you use stay in region too.
This is worth verifying rather than assuming, particularly for newer or more specialised managed services, which sometimes reach Indian regions later than the core compute and storage offerings. This is a general principle rather than legal advice; if your compliance position is uncertain, take proper advice on it.
For comparable workloads, headline pricing across the three is close enough that it should rarely be the deciding factor. Where meaningful differences appear, they usually come from your own circumstances rather than the rate card: existing licences you can bring, committed-use or reserved-instance discounts you are willing to commit to, and how well the architecture fits the provider's pricing model.
Egress charges deserve specific attention. Moving data out of any cloud costs money, and for data-heavy workloads this can dominate the bill in ways a simple compute comparison misses.
The cheapest provider on paper is often not the cheapest in practice, because the practice includes your team's time.
The uncomfortable truth is that this decision matters less than the decisions that follow it. A well-architected environment on your second-choice provider will outperform a badly architected one on your first choice, comfortably.
If you would like an honest assessment of which platform fits your situation, including the cases where our answer is not Azure, start the conversation on our contact page.
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