Every few months a team asks us to compare the three major clouds so they can choose correctly. The honest answer is that for the overwhelming majority of Indian businesses, all three will run the workload competently, all three have multiple Indian regions, and the feature differences that generate the most argument are the ones that matter least to the decision. AWS operates regions in Mumbai and Hyderabad, Microsoft Azure has regions across western, central and southern India, and Google Cloud runs regions in Mumbai and Delhi. Data residency, for most purposes, is satisfied by any of them.
The two things that actually decide it are what your people already know and what commercial relationship you already have. A team fluent in one provider will build better systems on it than on a marginally superior alternative they are learning, because most cloud failures come from misconfiguration rather than from platform limitations. Similarly, an organisation with an existing enterprise agreement, committed spend or partner relationship is buying at a different price than the public rate card, and that discount frequently exceeds any efficiency difference between the platforms.
There are a few genuine tilts worth naming. Organisations deeply invested in Microsoft's identity and productivity stack get real integration value from Azure that is not merely marketing — single identity, consistent policy, and one licensing conversation. Teams whose centre of gravity is data and machine learning often find Google Cloud's data platform the more natural home. Teams that want the broadest service catalogue and the deepest pool of people who have already operated it tend toward AWS. None of these is decisive on its own.
Regulatory workloads deserve their own check rather than an assumption. If you are subject to RBI data localisation, sectoral guidance or a customer contract with residency terms, verify the specific services you intend to use are available in an Indian region and that their supporting infrastructure — backups, managed service control planes, logging destinations — stays in India too. This is where the difference between providers shows up, and it is service by service rather than provider by provider.
Be sceptical of multi-cloud as a default strategy. It is sometimes right, usually for regulatory or customer-mandated reasons. As a hedge against lock-in, it typically doubles the operational surface, halves the depth of expertise on each platform, and forfeits the committed-spend discounts that make cloud affordable. If you cannot state the specific scenario multi-cloud protects you from, you are buying complexity rather than insurance.
The practical approach is to shortlist on the two structural questions, then test rather than debate. Take one real workload — not a proof of concept, something with actual traffic and actual data — and run it properly on the leading candidate for a month. That produces a real bill, a real operational experience and a real answer, which is worth considerably more than any comparison table including this one.
