Much of the world's cloud computing infrastructure is controlled by a handful of big tech companies in the Western United States, and what they have built is only optimized to meet the needs of the richest companies and governments, according to J.J. Kardwell, CEO of cloud computing company Vultr.

As the global push to cloudify businesses and operations continues, Vultr’s goal is to democratize the “critical layers of infrastructure” needed to enable high-performance cloud computing, Kardwell told SDxCentral.

Vultr claims to be the largest privately held cloud computing company at what Kardwell called “an IPO-scale." There are “very few” companies within the independent cloud market that can compete against the big tech clouds, he added.

“It's a rare set of businesses that have the technological sophistication to be more efficient and to be able to deliver, frankly, a better price performance,” Kardwell explained.

Often, independent cloud companies are referred to as “regional cloud providers” because they also lack the expansive global footprint compared to their larger counterparts. Vultr is hoping to change that dynamic.

The company has a global customer base of a quarter million customers across 32 data center locations, with its most recent additions in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Manchester, England. Kardwell said this footprint is “comparable to [Amazon Web Services'] and dramatically larger than that of any other independent cloud provider.”

Vultr has opened 15 locations in the last 18 months, a cadence of global expansion driven by the mission of “eclipsing the data center availability offered by the big three hyperscaler cloud providers.”

“Our focus really is making high performance, cloud computing easy to use, affordable and locally accessible, and we serve businesses and developers globally,” Kardwell said.

The cloud has become an essential tool for all individuals and businesses, providing them with the ability to store and process large amounts of data, access applications and services and collaborate with others from anywhere in the world. However, Kardwell said that the “Western and American U.S.-centric lens” through which the dominating cloud operators view these markets has led to an inequitable distribution of essential cloud infrastructure.

“If you think about the critical layers of infrastructure that need to exist to enable cloud computing, it's really data centers, fiber connectivity, network connectivity,” he said. “You're talking about massive population markets like Brazil and India, where they are underserved in a way that limits innovation.”

In the U.S., the race to build new data centers and fiber infrastructure was principally a decade or more ago, and new infrastructure is still getting built. By contrast, countries like India – with a population that's much larger than the U.S. and has as many broadband connections as the U.S., according to Kardwell – are just starting to see significant investments in infrastructure from hyperscalers.

This has major implications for individuals and businesses within countries that are lagging in cloud infrastructure. The high cost of entry and limited availability of cloud computing infrastructure in certain regions of the world can make it challenging for startups and businesses to innovate and compete on a global stage.

Vultr’s focus is on providing cloud infrastructure and services in specific geographic locations, which helps to reduce latency and unnecessary bandwidth expenses, particularly for customers who are located far away from hyperscale cloud data centers.

“That matters because of latency, but also because of affordability and the impact that it has on bandwidth usage. If you're a Johannesburg-based user and accessing a system in Madrid, not only are you experiencing latency, but you're also incurring unnecessary bandwidth expense in all likelihood,” Kardwell said. “That issue of democratizing access is what we take for granted in the U.S., as far as physical data centers network connectivity, let alone actual full-stack heavy compute at the edge, cloud computing infrastructure that's close to users."