Recently, Gartner published its 2022 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS) report and unsurprisingly, AWS, Microsoft, and Google continue to be the only leaders in the industry. For the first time however, Microsoft placed furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis, a position AWS has held for years.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant reports are widely considered to provide a holistic view of current cloud providers’ capabilities, and the scope for the CIPS report includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and integrated platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS continues to be a Leader in this Magic Quadrant and Gartner noted its breadth of functionality, current market-share lead, and vibrant and prosperous ecosystem as strengths. Of all the providers in the market for CIPS, AWS continues to lead the way with the most capabilities and serves as a guiding force for the overall market. Over the years, AWS has set accepted standards within the industry, developing and establishing technologies that are often copied by competing cloud competitors.
Its revenue leads the way in the industry and AWS continues to be the leader in terms of market share. In fact, Gartner says AWS’s market share is double that of its closest competitor, Microsoft Azure. As a result of its dominant market share, AWS attracts many partners to its services, to the point that ISV partners have an “AWS first” mentality when it comes to deciding which cloud providers to initially support.
The report does point out a few cautions for AWS, including eroding customer relationships, the company’s multicloud and sovereign strategy, and its regional dependencies and communication. When conducting customer inquiries for the report, Gartner found that AWS often optimizes for the short term with its customers, resulting in eroding customer relationships. Gartner also notes that AWS has a relatively weak strategy to support customers who are looking for multicloud and sovereign solutions. Finally, AWS’s operational incident from December 7, 2021 exposed the company’s multiregion dependencies on the internal AWS network, which is hosted on us-east-1. That is also where support ticketing for North America is hosted, which meant AWS customers had difficulty reaching technical support during the incident.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure was noted for being strong in all use cases, including extended cloud and edge computing. The cloud service continues to work particularly well with Microsoft-centric businesses, and the company continues to invest heavily in hybrid and multicloud. This is in addition to architectural and security improvements to its Azure platform.
Notable strengths for Microsoft include market share, being solutions-oriented, and its focus on hybrid and multicloud. While there’s still a noticeable difference in market share between Microsoft and leader AWS, Microsoft Azure continues to close the gap year-over-year. Gartner believes the worldwide gap with AWS will shrink within the foreseeable future and is already occurring in Europe. The Azure platform continues to leverage its early, differentiated position in broad segments including telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and financial services. The cloud service’s broad range of capabilities and complementary ecosystem continues to be a strength in providing for customer use cases. Finally, Microsoft is continuing to focus on hybrid and multicloud solutions through Azure Arc, and believes that simplified operations are required to operate diverse environments safely and effectively.
As for cautions, Gartner noted the following for Microsoft Azure: security issues and lack of innovation, opaque costs, and punitive licensing. Although Azure is growing in market share, it was relatively quiet when it came to innovations within the market. Gartner cautions that competitors Google and Oracle will likely match or even exceed some of Azure’s capabilities in the coming years. Costs continue to be an issue for Microsoft Azure, with customers noting increases over time without a clear explanation as to why. Complex costs associated with Microsoft licensing and support also affects Azure customers, and restrictions with the use of Microsoft licensing is not often communicated well to customers.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) continues to be a strong contender for nearly all use cases and has recently made noticeable progress in improving its edge capabilities. Its customer base ranges from startups to large enterprises and its operations are geographically diverse.
Strengths for GCP include revenue and capabilities gains, sales execution, and sovereign cloud. According to Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for CIPS, GCP had both the highest percentage of revenue gains and improvements of any cloud provider in the market. In addition, the company’s focus on enterprises and selling to business executives instead of technical teams is paying dividends. Finally, GCP is more flexible and willing to partner with in-country operators to create sovereign cloud alternatives in key regions.
For cautions, Gartner noted increasing prices, strategic confusion, and financial losses for Google Cloud. Google recently increased prices by as much as 100% for some of its storage services and it could be the first of more price increases to come. As for strategic confusion, Gartner noted that although Google maintains customer enablement programs for both its Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP) and Cloud App Modernization Program (CAMP), it found CAMP was hardly spoken of from Google Cloud clients and RAMP was more prevalent in the market. Finally, GCP is the only CIPS provider with significant market share that operates at a financial loss.
Save Money on Cloud Storage
Are you interested in cloud storage for your business? Save up to 70% on cloud storage with WindRate! Simply fill out this form and you’ll receive quotes from our partners. You choose who to respond to and when, and it’s of no cost or obligation to you!