Gartner has released its latest figures showing scores for cloud IaaS scores. The market researcher shows that Microsoft’s Azure platform is in second place behind Amazon’s AWS.
The Google Cloud Platform come in third, the results show. Gartner says this score is amongst its most popular research results.
Amazon Web Services: 92%
Microsoft Azure: 88%
Google Cloud Platform: 70%
There is not really a whole lot of surprise to see Azure in second place. AWS is the market leader in cloud, but it is very clear that Microsoft’s platform is gaining ground. Since Satya Nadella took the Microsoft helm two years ago, the company has transformed into a cloud first provider. The payoff of that decision has been boosted financial performance and Azure catching up to AWS consistently.
Gartner bases its scoring on a set Evaluation Criteria, which was updated this past May. There are 234 criteria split into these categories:
Technical:
Compute
Networking
Storage
Security and Access
Non-technical:
Service Offerings
Management and DevOps
Service and Support Levels
Price and Billing
Each criteria section is split into Required, Proffered, and Optional. The company then conducts an in-depth study of each service to find how they rank against each other. The Microsoft Azure assessment is worth a read to see how Gartner scored the platform.
It is worth remembering that just a few years ago, Amazon’s market position in IaaS looked untouchable. Microsoft has made such ground in such a short space of time that many predict Azure will become the market leading cloud service in the near future.
