Best Alternative to AWS S3, Azure, Google Drive Replacement in 2018

Are you looking for the best alternative to AWS S3, Azure, Google Drive? If you wanted to replace those or set up a new cloud storage system for your company, you may want to read this article. But before I start off I have to say people will call this ‘a rant’ when they really mean ‘I don’t want to hear it’….

In a nutshell what I think is going on at the moment in the cloud business is commoditization. Commoditization is what happened to a lot of products during the Industrial Revolution.

I’ll pick an example from our area here in Baltimore, Maryland. Have you ever visited the Baltimore Museum of Industry? They have some interesting items on display from the ‘good old days’ over a 100 years ago when Baltimore was actually a great place to live in…well apart from the air quality and work conditions 😉

One interesting item is packaged bread. You will find replicas there of old retail stores, selling among many other local items, packaged ‘toast’ (pre-sliced) “bread”, dating back over a hundred years. Do you know the real reason why toast bread is pre-sliced? Not only for convenience, but you would also notice there is no way of cutting it, since it’s so soft and pumped up with air.

The skilled immigrants bakers came over in the decades before that, people who were specially trained bakers, who knew how to make various types of breads by hand.

With the advent of industrialization bread making was automated and commoditized, i.e. it gradually become the crappy sponge it is today, not all over sudden. However, the big ‘downturn’ in bread quality came with the factory production and manipulative marketing.

Fast forward a few decades into the mid-1900s and there were no bakeries left. Because the ‘pricing’ and convenience of factory bread “won”. They did that by gradually increasing the consumer’s ‘bread stupidity’ (^_^) and decreasing quality ingredients and eliminating traditional bread making techniques.

What does ‘price’ mean anyways? You exchange money for something in order to buy it–but what are you buying? Most people have no idea what’s in bread today or how it’s made. Most people in U.S. never ate ‘good bread’ in their life, I’m talking about a bread made by a master baker sold in a real bakery. Find one! And what’s much worse, the worst thing of all, those people today won’t like the taste of a bread baked by a master baker…. The bread eaters have become a bunch of ‘bread idiots’. Quality went down the drain, gradually. Competition didn’t create a better bread, it created the worst in the world.

People come back from Italy and tell me they didn’t like the food. I didn’t know how to smack them so they wake them up. But it’s too late, you can’t… This is how bad the evolution of the capitalistic production has become. The consumer is now just a puppet of the industry….

When you pay close attention you will notice that when people have no idea about the product/service they are buying, they get fixated on the price, as everyone knows 9 < 10, and they don’t realize they are getting a bad deal overall. This is basically one of the reasons why Home Depot, Walmart, and Amazon had such a destructive force in the market. First they brought a huge range of variety, easy returns, long hours, air conditioning, etc, and then once the competitors were wiped out, they gradually reduced product and service quality to a minimum while keeping prices high.

Home Depot destroyed the hardware stores nationwide, now they sell mostly garbage and only temp workers work there for a few weeks at a time, no wonder no one is there to answer questions properly.

Walmart is now the ‘made in China’ store, even the fish is from China, small retailers are gone, no quality food to be found anywhere unless you are willing to drive far.

Amazon killed the book stores, now they want to rule the internet with Google, not by giving you a great deal but by hiding good deals from you… I still prefer the bookstore but now there aren’t any. Now I end up buying books that aren’t worth the paper they are printed on simply because I can’t read the book before buying it, and because there is no bookstore salesperson to help me find a better book… In other words, they reduced the book buying experience to the bare minimum, and it is our (the consumers’) fault.

So in a nutshell, when you buy from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google:

• what exactly are you buying? I’m not so sure and lots of others aren’t either.
• do you know how much, exactly, is it going to cost? Definitely not
• who will help you when things stop working? No one, and definitely not for free
• who will guide you to come up with the best strategy for your company? Definitely no one
• who will suggest better ways of doing things that might save you time, money, sweat, and headaches? 100% no one

Corporations will basically continue enriching themselves (on the backs of the people who work there) and you will pay for it more than its fair value would be and get subpar quality.

So where can we obtain cloud backup technology that isn’t corporate “one size fits all”? If you are looking for a solution in the small to medium sized business market you could give BackupChain a shot. Unlike the ‘big guys’ the BackupChain team will take the time to help you find the best solution and backup strategy for your company. Unlike the big corporations the BackupChain team will be there when you need help. And, they will give you guide you through the process and help you make the most out of the technology you already have.