AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI: choosing a cloud provider for regulated industries

While many stress the need to assess cloud vendors’ compliance and security standards, few provide a side-by-side comparison of cloud service providers for regulated industries—crucial information that can help companies make an informed decision.

In this article, we fill this gap by breaking down how leading cloud platforms—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)—approach compliance, data residency, sovereignty, security, and shared responsibility.

Certifications and compliance

Regulatory compliance is nonnegotiable, and achieving it requires the right combination of tools, governance policies, security measures, and monitoring practices from all stakeholders. The diversity of regulatory requirements in cloud computing across regions, business sectors, and services, combined with their constantly evolving nature, makes compliance increasingly complex. As a result, there is no universal set of regulations that every cloud platform must meet. When evaluating cloud providers, verify their adherence to:

• Regional regulations, such as GDPR in the EU and CCPA in California
• Industry standards, like HIPAA for healthcare, PCI DSS for payment data, or FedRAMP for the U.S. government
• International security frameworks, including ISO 27001, SOC 2, and NIST

No provider covers every regulation out of the box, but all leading cloud platforms offer a strong foundation for compliance.

AWS

AWS boasts the most extensive compliance portfolio, with more than 140 security standards and certifications covering thousands of regional and industry-specific requirements across the globe, including HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-3, and NIST 800-171.

AWS allows organizations to inherit the latest security controls it uses to protect its own infrastructure, strengthening their compliance and certification efforts while reducing the time and cost required to meet specific security assurance requirements.

It also offers the following compliance tools and services:

• AWS Audit Manager automates evidence collection, maps AWS resources to industry frameworks, and keeps audit readiness continuous.
• AWS Artifact is a self-service portal that allows organizations to access and download AWS compliance documentation, agreements, and auditor-issued reports.
• Amazon GuardDuty is an AI-powered threat-detection service that offers continuous monitoring for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect AWS accounts, workloads, and data.
• AWS Security Assurance Services help organizations operating in regulated industries assess, implement, and optimize security and compliance controls in line with domain-specific standards.

Azure

Microsoft invests heavily in the security and compliance of its cloud ecosystem, embedding advanced security solutions across its services. Following are some of the key tools:

• Entra ID manages user identities and controls access to apps, data, and resources.
• Defender for Cloud continuously assesses safety posture across cloud and on-premises resources, detects threats, and secures multicloud and hybrid environments.
• Purview Compliance Manager automatically evaluates and manages compliance across multicloud environments and generates audit-ready reports.
• Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics, threat detection, and automated incident response across enterprise environments.

This approach gives Azure a broad compliance portfolio, including more than 100 offerings, with over 50 certifications specific to global regions and countries and 35 certifications specific to healthcare, finance, government, manufacturing, education, and media.

GCP

GCP’s compliance portfolio spans numerous global, regional, and industry-specific frameworks, including ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701, SOC 1/2/3, and PCI DSS, as well as FedRAMP, C5, and APRA. This provides a robust foundation for building a cloud architecture for regulated environments.

GCP protects customer data, identities, and apps using the same practices, secure-by-design infrastructure, global network, and built-in protection that Google uses for its own solutions. GCP also provides optional security controls for customers in regulated industries, as well as these specialized services:

• Assured Workloads allows organizations to configure a sovereign data and access boundary with defined residency, access, and personnel controls for sensitive workloads in GCP. The service enforces staffing and location restrictions, monitors configuration changes, and blocks operations that could violate regulatory requirements.
• Compliance Manager helps define and deploy compliant configurations, monitor alignment with compliance and security requirements through visual dashboards, and audit customers’ cloud environments.
• Security Command Center continuously scans cloud resources for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and policy violations, helping teams identify and prioritize issues before they become incidents. The tool also enables automated monitoring, threat detection, and compliance reporting.

OCI

OCI services comply with GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 1/2/3, ISO/IEC, FedRAMP, and many others. Like other hyperscalers, OCI offers a suite of tools and services to facilitate compliance and security management for organizations in regulated industries. These include:

• Compliance Documents, a self-service portal providing audit-ready artifacts that OCI customers can use to verify compliance coverage.
• Cloud Guard, included in every OCI tenancy, helps maintain operational compliance by detecting threats, flagging misconfigurations, and monitoring insecure activities.
• Security Zones, which prevent resources from being created or modified in ways that violate your required security or compliance standards

Security measures

All four cloud giants have a strong focus on security, offering regulated industries a predictable, auditable environment that meets the demands of cloud security for healthcare and finance. This includes:

• Layered security controls: AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI apply defense-in-depth across physical facilities, networks, host infrastructure, and identity systems. Each layer has its own protection mechanism, such as secure and verified boot, runtime integrity checks, and hardened host.
• Data encryption: These providers apply encryption by default for data in transit and at rest, while allowing customers to manage and supply their own keys through specialized tools like AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP Cloud KMS, and OCI Vault.
• Identity and access control: All providers use access policies, multifactor authentication (MFA), and continuous authorization checks. Their identity and access management systems (IAM)—AWS IAM, Azure Entra ID, Google Cloud IAM, and OCI IAM—enable organizations to define access rules and record every access attempt.
• Threat detection and ongoing monitoring: Leading platforms provide native services that identify anomalies, suspicious access patterns, and malware behavior across networks, workloads, and identities in real time. This helps teams take preventive measures before an incident escalates.
• Network isolation and segmentation: Providers enable private networking, segmentation, and zero-trust principles by design. Customers can isolate sensitive workloads, set strict ingress and egress rules, and ensure traffic inspection and encryption across hybrid and multicloud environments.
• Resilience and recovery: AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI incorporate backup, replication, disaster recovery, and failover features for organizations to withstand failures or attacks.

AWS

AWS offers several independent environments to minimize the influence of extraterritorial laws. These include AWS GovCloud operated by U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud for organizations that require all data, operations, and administrative access to remain under EU jurisdiction.

Additionally, AWS supports both on-premises and near-premises deployment models. AWS Outposts enables organizations to run native AWS services on premises and connect to a wide range of services available in the nearest AWS region. This benefits workloads that need low-latency access to local systems, in-country data processing and data residency, as well as gradual migration with local system interdependencies.

Azure

Azure boasts the broadest cloud region coverage among major providers, offering more jurisdictions to choose from, and therefore more flexibility in aligning workloads with local regulations. For data moving between data centers, Azure applies strong network-level controls using IEEE 802.1AE MAC Security Standards. For operational metadata (logs, telemetry, service identifiers), it creates pseudonymous identifiers to reduce direct identifiability, while still treating them as personal data under GDPR.

Additionally, Azure defines clear geographic boundaries that determine where data is stored and processed. For example, the EU Data Boundary applies to countries in the EU and the European Free Trade Area and ensures that all data remain within this jurisdiction. Microsoft also strengthens jurisdictional control inside the commercial cloud with specialized tools, services, and governance frameworks, including Cloud for Sovereignty. Extending this principle even further, the provider offers a fully segregated environment—Azure Government—for U.S. government agencies and their accredited contractors.

GCP

Although GCP doesn’t offer a single, separate sovereign cloud like AWS, it allows organizations to apply sovereignty controls as needed. Through Assured Workloads, companies can select the regions where their data is stored and processed, ensuring it stays within approved jurisdictions.

For enterprises requiring complete isolation, Google offers Distributed Cloud—on-premises and air-gapped deployments that keep data, operations, and administrative control entirely inside the customer’s environment. In some countries, the Sovereign Controls by Partners program is also available. This allows regulated workloads to run under the operational oversight of trusted local providers like T-Systems in Germany, S3NS in France, and Minsait in Spain.

OCI

OCI organizes its cloud in a slightly different way than the other providers. Each region is grouped into realms—fully isolated operating environments that contain one or more cloud regions. A realm has its own control plane, operational processes, and access boundaries. When a customer creates a tenancy, it exists within a single realm and cannot reach regions outside it. Customer content, backups, and operational metadata are stored and processed inside the chosen region. Since realms are isolated from one another, data never spills into another realm.

To meet the strictest jurisdictional control, Oracle offers sovereign realms. A clear example is the EU Sovereign Cloud, with regions located entirely within the European Union, operated by EU-based legal entities, and supported by EU residents.

The same approach is applied to governments and defense organizations in the U.S., UK, and Australia.

For markets where regulations or industrial policy prioritize domestic operation, Oracle provides a partner-operated model, called Alloy, which allows a national provider to operate a full OCI cloud under its own brand and jurisdiction.

Additionally, OCI offers Dedicated Region—a full-stack OCI environment deployed within a customer’s own data center. This gives organizations physical control, local connectivity, and full jurisdictional certainty, while providing customers with access to the same APIs, scalability patterns, security controls, and managed services available in OCI’s public cloud.

A key advantage of OCI over other leading cloud providers is its service parity across commercial, sovereign, government, and Dedicated Region deployments, eliminating the typical trade-offs between sovereignty and functionality.

Shared responsibility

Every major cloud provider operates under a shared responsibility model that defines the obligations of the provider and customer.

AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI all secure the infrastructure that runs their services, including data centers, networks, physical servers, hypervisors, and managed services. Customers are responsible for configuring and operating their resources: identities, access policies, data governance, and compliance alignment.

However, each provider interprets and structures this principle differently, and the level of responsibility varies depending on the service used. For regulated workloads, these nuances matter for building a secure, compliant cloud infrastructure from the start.