This year, Rightscale conducted an in depth survey of over 1000 tech professionals to find out which cloud provider they were using, planning to use, or experimenting with. Unsurprisingly, Amazon Web Services came in first with Microsoft and Google as the closest runners up as can be seen in this graph:

What this data means

As Amazon is still the leader at 57% currently running apps in the AWS cloud, however, a very small percent of IT professionals plan to use it in the future at 8%. Because of this, it seems very likely that Azure is going to quickly gain momentum on Amazon Web Services as the number of people planning on using Azure is nearly double that of Amazon at 15%.

This is also compounded by the fact that a huge number of people (29%) are currently experimenting with Azure. So, if in 2016 Azure comes out with options and benefits that are definitively better than Amazon, we could see a massive shift in those that are actually using AWS over to the Azure cloud.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud is also gaining in terms of IT professionals that are looking to eventually use their services. IBM, Oracle, and VMware all look to be growing at a slow and steady pace behind Google with VMware seeing more experimenting than any other smaller cloud provider.

Further Insights

It looks like Amazon Web Services have begun to reach their limit in terms of how many people will be planning to use their services in the coming years.

One thing to note, is that these are the results of a purely public cloud survey where the respondents did not have any private cloud usage.

It’s worth noticing that in the same survey by Rightscale, the private cloud usage did increase as well. This is most likely due to the popularization of the “hybrid cloud” adoption. Using both public and private cloud storage has increased in popularity for two reasons. It is regarded as generally more safe to use because of the private cloud hosting security while still maximizing efficiency due to quick access your applications over the cloud at any time with public cloud usage.

With more and more people realizing that Microsoft Azure is worthy of taking a look at, you might want to also take a look at some of the Azure cloud computing options we offer our clients here.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/sky-clouds-rays-sun-hope-sunbeam-1107952/