Seeking Non-US Alternatives for Cloud, Backup & Productivity Services
Posted by buy_chocolate_bars@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 27 comments
Hi r/sysadmin,
Due to the ongoing trade tensions between the US and Canada, our company is looking to reduce our dependency on US-based service providers. We're currently using Veeam for backups, AWS for our cloud infrastructure, and Office365 for productivity, to name a few.
I'm interested in learning about your experiences with non-US based alternatives that offer comparable reliability, feature sets, and support. What options have you evaluated or implemented? Not just the sets of services above, but in general.
chrisf_nz@reddit
I'm interested to know which of these alternative CSPs are supported by Terraform? If I consider an alternative CSP (workloads on AWS), I'm keen to avoid Clickops.
PhadedAF@reddit
Going through the same exercise. Based out of Canada. We're married to Veeam for B&R for 3 years, but they aren't willing to come down in price for their new Veeam Data Cloud BaaS offering for M365 backups. I found eazybackups which looks decent and someone in this thread already recommended. Other than that, I'm in the same boat.
bjc1960@reddit
This whole trade issue will be resolved in a month or two - it is just political posturing. Changing cloud vendors and all that is a major disruption.
RedNailGun@reddit
I use these guys. I always got great service. eazyBackup
.
catherder9000@reddit
We use Sync.
Have had 0 complaints in 2 years. (Parts of the Canadian Government also use Sync.)
We are also still married to Veeam and Wasabi for a couple years and don't see moving away from wasabi any time soon (they've been so reliable and have such good pricing).
Timely-Helicopter173@reddit
I don't know where you are but:
https://european-alternatives.eu/
wampa604@reddit
Windows is a subscription / service, with copious connections to Microsoft assets.
You switching to linux for your end users?
fp4@reddit
I use CometBackup and am quite happy with it. It’s made in New Zealand, supports your own storage, requires way less resources than Veeam.
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
For O365, we are an MSP and have several clients asking to go back to self-hosted. And I don't blame them one bit.
For cloud infrastructure there are smaller Canadian ones but you'll have to look around.
FenixSoars@reddit
Managing exchange on-prem is... ass.
I thought MS was killing off on-prem exchange this year or in the next couple??
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
Nope, it just requires software assurance agreement. I still don't get the big deal, been managing it for 20 years, it has matured very well.
FenixSoars@reddit
I just prefer out of sight, out of mind when it comes to email. If I can pay someone $10-$15/month to handle all that for me, I'm down.
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
Sure but I think you are missing the point of this thread. The US has now become hostile to Canada (and others) so many of us are looking to get out of US controlled companies. If that means a bit of pain self hosting or finding another vendor to host it and losing some features, so be it.
FenixSoars@reddit
I mean, what alternative would you move to that isn't Exchange On-Prem, which is still controlled by an American based company.
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
It's not controlled by them though... It's hosted on our own infrastructure. The US has laws in effect that allow it to access any datacentre run by a US company regardless of where it is actually located. https://www.impossiblecloud.com/blog/how-the-cloud-act-challenges-gdpr-compliance-for-eu-businesses-using-u-s-s3-backup
As for providers, there are some and they would have to be vetted. This is a serious concern for us outside of the US.
FenixSoars@reddit
Being in the US, I'm glad we don't have to worry much with all this. Makes things much simpler.
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
I don't think I would want to be in the US right now haha. My partner is American and we have to go there next month. Not looking forward to it and I will spend as little as possible.
Brandhor@reddit
365 doesn't really have any alternatives unless you want to self host exchange 2019 which is gonna be eol in a few months anyway
for cloud you can use ovh in canada, on the plus side it's cheaper than aws but feature wise it's not as rich
for example for cloud instances there aren't that many options and all services are limited to 1 zone, instance backups can be scheduled but block storage backups can't and you need to script them via openstack, object storage doesn't support lifecycle policies
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
Exchange SE is due to be released in Q3 IIRC.
bagaudin@reddit
We're Swiss-Singaporean company and have an office in Turkey. Our Acronis Cyber Protect can fill not just backup/DR but plenty of other needs.
jypelle@reddit
Maybe you'll find what you're looking for here: r/Startups_EU
weehooey@reddit
+1 for OVHcloud (French)
We have been using for about five years. Depending on the workload you might find it less expensive than AWS.
tankerkiller125real@reddit
I don't use OVH for work, but I do use OVH for my personal server hosting needs, and I've found them to be rock solid over the many years I've used them. The only thing questionable was that data center fire, but it seems that they've implemented a lot of things to prevent that fiasco from happening again.
yeehawjinkies@reddit
Here’s what the algy said.
Here are some non-US alternatives for cloud, backup, and productivity services that might suit your needs while maintaining reliability and compliance:
Cloud Infrastructure • OVHcloud (France) – A strong alternative to AWS, offering public and private cloud solutions, bare-metal servers, and compliance with EU regulations. • Scaleway (France) – A solid IaaS and PaaS provider with competitive pricing and data centers in the EU. • Hetzner (Germany) – Known for affordable dedicated servers and cloud instances, though it lacks some advanced cloud-native features. • UpCloud (Finland) – A performance-focused cloud provider with global reach, including European and Asia-Pacific data centers.
Backup & Disaster Recovery • Acronis (Switzerland & Singapore) – A well-known alternative to Veeam with strong security and compliance features. • Synology Active Backup (Taiwan-based hardware, software is global) – A great on-prem and cloud backup solution for SMBs. • Bacula Enterprise (Switzerland) – An open-source, enterprise-grade backup solution that works across multiple environments. • IDrive (India-based parent company) – Provides cloud backup with strong encryption and multi-device support.
Productivity & Collaboration (Office 365 Alternatives) • ONLYOFFICE (Latvia) – A strong self-hosted and cloud-based alternative to Microsoft Office. • Zoho Workplace (India) – A full suite of productivity tools, including email, word processing, and video conferencing. • Nextcloud (Germany) – A self-hosted alternative to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Google Drive, with strong privacy controls. • Open-Xchange (Germany) – A good Exchange alternative for hosted email and collaboration.
Other Non-US Business Services • ProtonMail & ProtonDrive (Switzerland) – Privacy-focused email and storage alternatives to Outlook and OneDrive. • Tutanota (Germany) – Encrypted email with a strong privacy stance. • Infomaniak (Switzerland) – A full suite of cloud services, including hosting, email, and productivity tools.
Would you be looking for self-hosted solutions as well, or do you prefer managed services?
lexcyn@reddit
Check out https://www.cacloud.com/ - you might be hard pressed to find productivity software though... but you could always self host vs using M365.
Vas_@reddit
NextCloud. It's very good. I've replaced my private Microsoft services with it and it works really nicely overall. It's used by many large public institutions in Europe.
Burgergold@reddit
All I can say is good luck. Those aren't a few days/weeks projects