Cloud computing has become one of the key drivers of digital transformation today, and cloud service providers are basking in its aggressive adoption. With cloud datacenters of leading service providers available locally, the Indian enterprises are no longer worried about data residency at the least, and most of them have already paved a successful journey to cloud.
The market leaders
To no one’s surprise, the cloud computing market is led by Amazon Web Services (AWS), closely followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. While each provider has its own niche expertise, the IaaS market is ruled by AWS with a lion’s share of 40 percent.
Why AWS?
Not only is AWS the first of its kind in the market, the company also boasts of the most varied range of services across storage, computing, networking, security and enterprise applications. In December 2016, it announced three machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services.
Will the competition catch up?
According to Q3 data from Synergy Research Group, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba continue to grow their revenues faster than Amazon, but AWS still remains much bigger than the next five in the market combined. IBM has consistently been the third largest in the market, mainly due to its hosted private cloud services.
The smaller players
The bottom three of the top eight comprises of Oracle, Salesforce and Rackspace, each with its own niche in the market. With such a close knit and immensely competitive top bunch, it is quite impossible for any outsider to make a mark.
Cloud spending overtaking on-premise sales
The Indian enterprise is fast adopting the feature rich and agile cloud platform. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2021, the cloud computing and storage as a service market will be almost thrice that of traditional datacenter outsourcing in India.
AWS vs Azure vs Google
The cloud service market has several big players, apart from the top three, and yet it is the top three that are almost becoming synonymous to the very technology they sell. But what makes them so special? Docker-based container services, relational databases, machine learning services, off-the-shelf APIs and open approach to partnerships are a few commendable traits.
The shortcomings
Even the experts aren’t faultless. The Google Cloud Platform is still relatively smaller than the other two and is yet to mark its territory in the enterprise market. AWS might be the best of the best infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) provider, but it is still lacking in its hybrid cloud strategy. While Microsoft Azure is rapidly gaining market, it has a bad reputation for frequent outages and its contracts can sometimes prove to be less flexible than desired.
Top concerns
With adoption out of the way, the Indian enterprise needs to focus on integration and navigate through multi-cloud environments. Additionally, the lack of friendly pricing has also proven to be a challenge for IT heads of the country. With the global market being marginally in the favor of AWS, which side will the Indian enterprise take?
