The Cloud Wars are heating up. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are locked in a dead-heat, as both are currently ranked #1 in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant report for cloud providers. Both companies scored a 94%, an improvement of 2% for AWS and 6% for Microsoft Azure, respectively. Third place went to Google Cloud Platform at 80%, which actually jumped up the most at 10%. These score increases are a reflection of the tremendous amount of innovation from these vendors, especially from Microsoft, which had to play catch-up for awhile.
Interestingly, companies are turning to more cloud providers these days in an effort to diversify and mitigate their risk, including providers that Gartner didn’t even rank like IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba. That being said, the front-runners are still second-to-none. AWS has significantly more features than its competitors, tons of data center capacity, and an extremely large online software store for the platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure offers superb hybrid capabilities for companies that want public and private clouds. Additionally, its Active Directory is an excellent identity management solution, and customers can run Azure technology on their own servers.
Finally, Gartner made it clear that as the technology matures, more companies will search for multiple providers to support a “multi-cloud strategy”. For now though, AWS and Azure dominate the cloud universe.
