While Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the dominant force in the cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) market, Microsoft’s Azure is gaining ground in second place, according to the latest market research.
The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is growing at a rate of knots, having expanded by 29.5% in 2017. In monetary terms, it’s grown from being worth $18.2 billion in 2016 to a grand total of $23.5 billion globally.
That’s according to Gartner, with analysts correctly pointing out that an increasing number of businesses are shifting their operations to the cloud.
The data centre, as we traditionally understand it, is doomed in the long run, with 80% of businesses planning on shutting down their internal data centres by 2025.
The top four cloud players – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Alibaba and Google are all set to obtain a bigger share of this growing market, with those four cloud tech providers currently representing 73% of the total IaaS market and 47% of the combined IaaS and infrastructure utility services (IUS) market.
Amazon raked in a cool $12.2 billion in AWS cloud revenue in 2017, which was up 25% on the previous year, boosted by more customers undertaking major digital transformation projects.
Microsoft is hot on AWS’s heels mind, having doubled its cloud revenue from Azure in the same time period, with revenue reaching $3.1 billion in 2017.
“Alibaba has the financial capability to continue this trend and invest in global expansion, giving the company potential to become over time an alternative to the global hyperscale cloud providers in select regions,” noted Gartner.
One thing is for sure, Amazon is going to have to continue innovating and pushing the tech envelope in the cloud market, as AWS has both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud accelerating rapidly behind it in this massive, fast-growing tech sector!
Via ZDNet
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