Multiple reports are showing that Microsoft Azure is increasingly becoming a major threat to AWS in the cloud space.
AWS is the current market leader among public cloud providers, with Microsoft Azure in second place and Google Cloud in third. Despite AWS’s lead, according to the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report, Azure usage has surpassed AWS in several instances, representing the first time this has happened in 11 years of Flexera’s reporting:
As in previous years, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform are the top three public cloud providers. But for the first time, Azure has closed the gap with AWS, while other cloud providers have not shown much growth. For each public cloud provider, respondents specified whether they’re running significant workloads in that cloud, running some workloads, experimenting, plan to use it or had no plans to use it.
Interestingly, Azure took the lead in overall breadth of adoption among organizations:
Azure passed AWS for breadth of adoption among enterprises. Google Cloud Platform has the highest percentage for experimentation (23 percent) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has the highest percentage of plan to use (twelve percent), which could drive more adoption in future years.
Azure also scored a win among “enterprises running some or significant workloads on the platforms.” While Azure tied with AWS at 47% of organizations using it for significant workloads, it surpassed AWS among organizations using it for some workloads, at 33% vs 30%.
Of the top six cloud providers, Azure was the only one that saw its adoption rate increase year-over-year, coming in at 80% in 2022 vs 76% in 2021. In contrast, AWS adoption rates dropped in 2022 to 77%, down from 79% in 2021. Similarly, Google dropped from 49% to 48% and Oracle dropped from 32% to 27%. IBM Cloud’s adoption rate stayed steady at 25%, while Alibaba dropped from 13% to 11%.
While Flexera’s report is telling enough, it’s supported by a new report from Credit Suisse. According to Investing.com, Credit Suisse analysts outlined how “Azure has grown meaningfully faster than AWS” and, as companies transition to the cloud, “the full multi-year impact of Azure’s growth opportunity is still not properly reflected in consensus estimates.”
Overall, the two reports are excellent news for Microsoft and dovetail with previous reports demonstrating the growth potential of Azure.
