AWS Narrowly Escapes Azure Defeat as Public Cloud Surges, Flexera Says

Source:-sdxcentral.com

Public cloud adoption continues to accelerate at a rapid pace with the top three cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — maintaining their positions as they lead the charge, according to Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud report.

The yearly benchmark assesses cloud adoption for insights into how organizations are progressing in their journey to the cloud. It includes their mix of public and private clouds, spend allocation, cost management, and strategies. The survey polled 750 “cloud decision-makers and users” from organizations ranging from 100 employees to more than 10,000 employees around the world and across a cross-section of organizations.

Most notably, following a strong performance in 2019, the study found that Azure continues to bite at the heels of AWS’ dominance in the enterprise market in terms of the number of large companies using Microsoft’s public cloud as well as the number of virtual machines deployed.

The survey specifically asked respondents about the following cloud giants: AWS, Azure, Google, VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Public Cloud, Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. It asked them to specify whether they are running applications in that cloud, experimenting with it, planning to use it, or had no plans to use it. And it should be noted that most respondents use more than one cloud, meaning that individual percentages sometimes totaled up to more than 100%, as stated in the report.

Azure to AWS: Make Way
AWS has long ruled the cloud, however, Azure nearly closed the gap as 69% of enterprise respondents are currently using the platform – up from 60% last year – and another 18% experimenting with Azure. Despite AWS sitting pretty with 76% of enterprise respondents currently using its cloud service, only 12% are experimenting with the platform, giving Azure a potential edge to gain new customers.

While AWS and Azure duke it out for top spot, GCP saw the strongest growth among the top three, growing from 20% to 34% in current use. Additionally, Google Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS reported the highest number of respondents experimenting on their platforms, which the report says can drive higher adoption in the future.

Seeking SMBs Affection

Small and medium-sized business (SMBs) on the other hand, who have traditionally shown a favorability to vendors VMware Cloud on AWS (10%), IBM (8%), and Oracle (6%), represent 10% or less of the market share in terms of current use. AWS dominates this sector of the market by a wide margin at 74% in terms of current use, followed by Azure (46%) and GCP (37%).

According to the report, 2019 saw SMB respondents with future projects – as indicated by the combination of the clouds they are experimenting with and planning to use – demonstrated the most interest in GCP followed closely by AWS.

In 2020, despite the sizable gap that AWS has created in this share of the market, it’s not all doom and gloom as respondents show a slight preference to Azure, with with 34% saying they are experimenting with or plan to use Azure. Google follows closely behind at 33%.

Adoption of VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Public Cloud, Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud continued to rise year over year. However, each one is still chosen by only a small percentage of SMBs.

COVID-19 Impact

People are leaning on internet services now more than ever before, resulting in a dramatic spike of internet usage as organizations continue to deal with an increase in new, inexperienced users and workloads.

Executives throughout the corporate and non-corporate world that delayed digitalization to the cloud are now scrambling to reset and execute a full digital transformation in matter of days and weeks. At a time where innumerable variables are up for debate, cloud companies are able to provide some semblance of normalcy with scalable cloud services.

We are witnessing a defining moment for cloud computing as it continues to provide connectivity between people and businesses on a global scale. The successes and failures of the data center industry in the coming months will lay the foundations for what might have been inevitable regardless of the novel coronavirus pandemic: a future of cloud computing.

“To gauge the initial impact of the pandemic on cloud plans, Flexera added a question to the survey while it was being conducted,” the report says. “The question captured the reactions of the last 25% of the people who responded.” According to the findings, 59% of enterprises say cloud usage will exceed prior plans due to the pandemic, which is likely to be a strong correlation to respondents belief that more than 50% of enterprise workloads and data will move to public cloud within 12 months.

“No company’s IT organization, no matter how large, will be able to match the efficiencies and agility of the cloud,” said Andres Rodriguez, CTO and co-founder of Nasuni, a cloud file services company, in an interview earlier this month.