Gap Shrinking in Cloud Computing

By Andrew Bindelglass, Contributing Writer  |  April 06, 2017

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) has long enjoyed a comfortable lead over its competitors when it comes to cloud computing. While that is still the case, a recent study by Sumo Logic has found that that gap is shrinking rapidly. Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Azure cloud computing platform is growing more powerful and advanced, and as such also is becoming more popular with businesses, especially larger ones.

As a matter of fact, Azure has already overtaken Amazon Web Services when it comes to the largest of businesses. “When asked which IaaS or PaaS vendors they were using (with multiple responses allowed), 66 percent of respondents cited Azure. Interestingly, more than half of the Azure users were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft's cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises. AWS came in second with 55 percent of respondents, followed by Salesforce App Cloud (28 percent), IBM Cloud (23 percent), and Google (News - Alert) Cloud (20 percent),” authors of the study wrote.

The results of this study served to reinforce what other market information has been saying for the past several months. Although Amazon has been the leader in cloud computing since it began focusing on it, other providers are beginning to catch up. In the past, Amazon could enjoy a comfortable spot at the top of the cloud computing world simply because of their superior technology and processing power. Today, this is starting to become no longer the case. Other providers can now provide similar processing speeds and are constantly updating their own technology.

Now, the main mode of competition is shifting from the back end technology to the front end user experience. When performance is even comparable, customers will gravitate to the solution that they feel is easiest to use. It seems that, at least for large businesses, Microsoft’s Azure platform has become more and more accepted as that solution. This is a good example of how cloud computing providers need to be constantly focusing on updating not only their back end technology that powers their platforms, but also the user facing aspects of their products. 




Edited by Alicia Young
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