Cloud providers with private networks trumped those that rely solely on the internet, according to a recent ThousandEyes report on cloud performance.

Google and Microsoft Azure delivered more predictable performance — especially outside the United States — when compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alibaba Cloud, the report concluded. IBM's performance varies by region but it also stands apart due to its hybrid approach, which utilizes a private and public internet backbone.

However, this variance in performance hasn't shaken Amazon's grip on the market. AWS remains the largest cloud provider by market share, followed by Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alibaba Cloud, and IBM, according to ThousandEyes.

While the report found comparable performance among all cloud providers in the U.S. market, the Asia Pacific and Latin American markets continued to experience the highest variations in performance.

Amazon experienced the greatest performance improvement in the challenging Asia Pacific market, with a 42% reduction in variability since last year, according to the report. However, these gains weren't enough to unseat Azure and GCP as performance leaders in the region.

The report also concluded that AWS Global Accelerator — a service that allows organizations to use the company's private backbone rather than the internet — wasn't a silver bullet either.

Azure, reportedly, saw similar improvements in performance variability in Sydney but the same couldn't be said of India where the cloud provider experienced a more than 30% loss in performance predictability since last year. Despite mixed performance in the Asia Pacific market, Microsoft Azure retained its top spot in the region.

GCP continued to perform well in this year's report, but ThousandEyes criticized the cloud provider's "significant global gaps" in service which have yet to be addressed. "Traffic from Europe and Africa takes 2.5-3 times longer to get to India going around the rest of the world instead of taking a direct route," the report reads.

Alibaba Cloud and IBM Cloud, two newcomers to the annual ThousandEyes report, performed comparably to the competition. Even accounting for performance variability, ThousandEyes notes that all cloud providers, including Alibaba, pay a performance toll when crossing China's firewall.

"Despite Alibaba's origins in China, it experiences packet loss when crossing through China's Great Firewall just as all the other providers do, showing it doesn't get any special treatment," ThousandEyes wrote in the report.

The network monitoring firm's report suggests performance may become a key differentiator as the global cloud services market continues to grow. Gartner predicts public cloud services revenue will grow 17%, reaching $266.4 billion in 2020.

The cloud has become mainstream, according to Sid Nag, VP of research at Gartner. "The expectations of outcomes associated with cloud investments, therefore, are also higher," he said in a prepared statement.

Software-as-a-service will fuel much of that growth. Gartner predicts the segment will grow to $116 billion next year.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is predicted to reach $50 billion in 2020, up 24% year-over-year, making it the highest growing segment as demand rises for applications and workloads.

Gartner also expects the managed service landscape to become increasingly competitive. "In fact, by 2022, up to 60% of organizations will use an external service provider's cloud-managed service offering, which is double the percentage of organizations from 2018," said Nag.