Business Choice Awards 2015: Cloud Computing Services
Source: Matt Sarrel

Everyone needs more storage. Businesses have plenty of options, from adding local drives and putting hard drives in servers to network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN). Cloud storage, however, is growing in popularity because it is cost effective, secure, highly available, and accessible on and off the corporate network via a variety of devices.

Choosing a cloud storage provider depends largely on your requirements. Some specialize in online backup while others focus on file syncing. Others are good at both. Many SOHO/SMB cloud storage services offer a free, but limited, account so you can try them out before you commit. Check out The Best Cloud Storage Services for 2015 for a deeper comparison and expert guidance. The big names provide online space suitable even for app development or full-blown mission-critical data storage.

Want to participate in future Business Choice Award surveys with other PCMag readers? Click here and sign up to receive invitations.

This edition of the PCMag Business Choice Awards focuses on cloud storage services, providers that maintain massive storage infrastructures to host backups and files. For more than 25 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviews with our Readers' Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend that by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment.

Our survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the cloud storage service they use and the likelihood they would recommend it to others. In addition, we inquired about their satisfaction with technical support and the overall reliability of the solution.

If you select, deploy, or administer the products in our Business Choice Awards, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, then you know how critical it is to choose the right products. The results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey are invaluable when doing so. Here are the best cloud storage services for your business, as selected by you.

Cloud Computing Storage Services

Cloud storage services offer a large variety of options that go far beyond the amount of storage you get for the price. They can support file versioning, file sharing, and have built-in viewers for common file formats. They may have a Web interface plus support for Windows, Mac, Android, and/or iOS. It's important to shop around, find the capabilities you need for the price you're willing to pay, and then double-check that you get what you pay for by reading PCMag's expert reviews and reader surveys.

Companies have different needs when it comes to cloud storage, so for this survey we asked readers at SOHOs and SMBs to rate their favorites, then asked readers at enterprise-sized offices to rate theirs.

In the SOHO/SMB category we awarded the Business Choice Awards for best cloud storage service to two finalists this year: Carbonite and Dropbox.

Their scores set them apart from the rest of the pack. In overall satisfaction, Carbonite edged out Dropbox slightly with a 7.9 versus 7.8 (10 is the best). That's the reverse of last year, where Dropbox edged slightly ahead of Carbonite. The rest of the pack that ranked in our survey―Google Drive (7.3), Box (6.9), Microsoft with OneDrive (6.9), and SugarSync (6.6)―couldn't keep up.



The top two had a pretty reliable flip-flop in the categories we asked about. For reliability, or the critically important ability of the cloud storage provider to serve up files and storage on a consistent basis, Dropbox was on top with an 8.5. Carbonite's own 8.2 kept it ahead of the others. On likelihood to recommend, we again saw Dropbox (8.0) and Carbonite (7.7) lead the pack.

In fact, the only category where one of them is lacking is Carbonite's 21 percent of users needing tech support―that's almost as bad as SugarSync's 25 percent. Dropbox, meanwhile, had the lowest score in this area, at 6 percent, indicating people don't need much help. Conversely, the satisfaction people have with that tech support is pretty low with Dropbox (5.3), albeit not as low as the tech support quality from Microsoft OneDrive or SugarSync. And yet Carbonite got an astronomically high score there of 9.5, despite the high amount of users needing help.

In the enterprise category, our winner was Amazon Web Services with the same score as last year, a 7.9. The rest of the pack were also unchanged from last year, some with higher scores (Cisco went from a dismal 6.2 in 2014 to a 7.1 this year), and some with lower (Microsoft and Google each fell by half a point in their overall scores).


Amazon is far and away the leader in reliability (8.4) and the likelihood to be recommended by colleagues (7.9). Its one deficiency is tech support, in that a full one-quarter of survey respondents needed it, and they only gave it a 7.0 score for quality. If you anticipate needing help, go with Cisco, which had a lower number of users who required help (21 percent) and they felt the quality of the help was simply better (8.5).