News

State of the Enterprise Cloud: Azure Closes Ground on AWS

• By David Ramel
• 02/20/2018

In its seventh annual cloud computing report, RightScale Inc. confirmed findings of many similar studies: Microsoft's Azure platform is gaining ground on Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), but there's a lot more ground left to make up.

"Among enterprises, Azure grew enterprise adoption strongly to 58 percent, gaining ground on AWS at 68 percent," says the "RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report."

Several other reports have arrived at similar conclusions, including:

• Microsoft and Google Surge in Cloud, But They Still Can't Catch AWS
• Report: Microsoft Chasing Cloud Leader AWS with 93 Percent Growth Rate
• Survey: Azure Beats AWS in Larger Enterprises
• Study: Microsoft Challenging AWS Domination of Public Clouds

However, as that last item -- covering RightScale's 2015 study -- shows, this trend has been reported for at least three years.

In its new report, RightScale shed further light on the Azure-vs.-AWS contest. "Among enterprises just beginning their cloud journey, Azure is used by 49 percent while AWS is at 47 percent. Azure also saw strong growth in the footprint of virtual machines used by its customers: 44 percent of Azure users have more than 50 VMs (up from 32 percent in 2017), while 59 percent of AWS users have more than 50 VMs (up from 51 percent in 2017)."

Across the board, public cloud adoption is still climbing. "Adoption of public cloud grew for all cloud providers," RightScale said. "Across all users, AWS increased adoption from 57 percent in 2017 to 64 percent in 2018; Azure increased from 34 to 45 percent; Google Cloud increased from 15 to 18 percent; IBM Cloud increased from 8 to 10 percent; VMware Cloud on AWS came right out of the gate strongly with 8 percent adoption; Oracle Cloud increased from 3 to 6 percent; and Alibaba Cloud showed 2 percent adoption in its first year being included in the survey."

Regarding that last point, Alibaba is increasingly being recognized as the new kid on the block in the cloud computing wars, as we detailed earlier this month in the article, "Research: Alibaba Joins AWS, Other Cloud Computing Leaders."

Other data points of interest reported by RightScale include:

• 96 percent of respondents now use cloud
• 81 percent of respondents have a multi-cloud strategy
• Organizations leverage almost 5 clouds on average
• Enterprise cloud spend is significant and growing quickly
• Companies run a majority of workloads in cloud
• Significant wasted cloud spend drives users to focus on costs
• Container use is up: Docker is used most broadly while Kubernetes grows quickly
• Use of configuration tools grows, with Ansible showing strongest growth
• Top cloud challenges in 2018 are security and spend

Regarding the last point about challenges, security continues to be a top-of-mind concern, especially in light of last year's spate of reports detailing wide-open, unencrypted cloud data stores leading to ransomware attacks and more.

Speaking of security and other challenges, the report revealed:

• Security is a challenge for 77 percent of respondents, while 29 percent see it as a significant challenge
• Managing cloud spend is a challenge for 76 percent of respondents, while a smaller 21 percent see it as a significant challenge
• Security is the largest issue among cloud beginners, while cost becomes a bigger challenge for intermediate and advanced users
• Enterprises cite more challenges across the board than SMBs

Somewhat incongruously, however, security is seemingly getting less attention from enterprise central IT teams, as they have cited security at a decreasing percentage for the past three years.

"Even among enterprise central IT teams, who typically have the most responsibility for security, there has been a significant decline in security concerns among this group over the last few years, declining further to 32 percent in 2018," RightScale said.

The annual report was conducted last month, garnering responses from 997 technical executives, managers and practioners across a range of industries from organizations of many different sizes.

RightScale summed up its findings thusly:

"The RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Survey showed that enterprise cloud spending will grow rapidly over the next year, and yet 35 percent of cloud spend is wasted. As a result, optimizing clouds costs is the top initiative for cloud users in 2018," said CEO Michael Crandell. "Multi-cloud continues to be the preferred strategy for enterprises, with companies reporting that they use nearly five different clouds on average. With this multi-cloud approach, Azure is now nipping at AWS’ heels and, in fact, is in a dead heat with AWS among enterprises that are just beginning their cloud adoption."