News

AWS Retains Stranglehold on $45 Billion Cloud IaaS Market

• By David Ramel
• 08/12/2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) retained its stranglehold on the nearly $45 billion Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market in the latest report from research firm Gartner.

The firm describes IaaS as "a standardized, highly automated offering in which computing resources owned by a service provider, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are offered to customers on demand."

The cloud, of course, is tailor-made for IaaS, and Gartner noted its importance in a market that grew 37.3 percent in 2019 to total $44.5 billion.

"Cloud underpins the push to digital business, which remains at the top of CIOs' agendas," said Sid Nag, Gartner research vice president. "It enables technologies such as the edge, AI, machine learning and 5G, among others. At the end of the day, each of these technologies require a scalable, elastic and high-capacity infrastructure platform like public cloud IaaS, which is why the market witnessed strong growth."

AWS, as it has for years, continues to lead that large market -- even with slightly less growth reported in 2019 -- with 45 percent market share.

While that scenario is familiar, so is the cast of characters following AWS, which is basically the same as when we reported on the 2017 report (for 2015-16), with the only change being Tencent has replaced Rackspace at No. 5:

"There will be a continued push of cloud spending as an outcome of the coronavirus pandemic," Nag said. "When enterprises were compelled to move their applications to the public cloud as a result of the pandemic, they realized the true benefits of public cloud and it is unlikely that they will change course. In the recovery and rebound phase, CIOs are recognizing that they don't need to bring workloads back on premises, which will further increase cloud spending and drive new applications around cloud-hosted collaboration that incorporate emerging technologies such as virtual reality and immersive video experiences."