Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure are the most used cloud platforms with a combined market-share that dwarfs the rest of the major suppliers including Google. Of the two, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most used platform, with Azure showing fast growth, particularly amongst enterprise businesses.
As cloud procurement and technologies have improved, there have been trends in which organisations have moved all their infrastructure to a single provider to simplify their IT systems while others have used the flexibility of multiple cloud platforms to use a combination of providers based on the best individual solutions that they offer – for example taking advantage of lower storage costs for archiving with one provider whilst utilising a higher class of virtual machine elsewhere to maximise application performance.
There are competing benefits between the services and facilities offered by the major cloud providers, but there are also similarities and in some cases, the choice of which platform is best will come down to one or two factors such as cost, or perceived compatibility. It can even be a decision which is made based on the preferences of the consultant who developed the virtualisation strategy.
There are some key aspects to the market that are worth considering:
There’s no doubt that Amazon, the AWS Company, is the main player in the cloud hosting market – but Microsoft and Google have been late entrants to the market by comparison. Furthermore, they both have experience chasing down competitors and they both have the money to do so. We can expect to see the market become more competitive, but in the meantime organisations should still ensure they have a strong understanding of their needs before choosing a provider – for the time being, this is still an industry of niche offerings.
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