- The cloud hype has continued unabated for almost a decade.
- You likely have encountered pressure to migrate to cloud services from within your organization.
- Key IT vendors, particularly Microsoft, are also pitching a cloud future for your IT infrastructure.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead the market in terms of number of customers, number of services, geographic reach, and sheer amount of data center space. Microsoft, Google, and IBM have been aggressive competitors.
- Microsoft, in particular, has been fast growing second to AWS as Microsoft has embarked on its “Cloud First/Mobile First” strategic pivot. Microsoft has had strong uptake in the enterprise and is closing the gap.
- Higher levels of abstraction will be increasingly important. Traditional IaaS providers metered access to virtualized processing, storage, and network units. But higher levels of infrastructure abstraction, such as container services and “serverless” computing, are growing in adoption.
Impact and Result
- Software development should take the lead. If you have any kind of development effort, any selection of cloud service should start with application development needs (specifically enabling a quicker time to value). It isn’t as simple as, “All things being equal, which IaaS provider is better?” All things are not equal.
- Gauge the Microsoft Effect on you. Microsoft’s pivot into cloud will have a huge impact or none at all depending on your current relationship with Redmond. A fully “Microsoft Shop” will likely find the choice of Azure a no-brainer.
- Make the connection. In an increasingly hybrid environment, how you connect your on-premises data center, or private cloud, to the public cloud is a critical consideration.