When it comes to enterprise cloud, Amazon AWS continues to lead the market. And that’s hardly surprising given that AWS has a seven-year headstart over its well-heeled competitors. However, the long-standing rival Microsoft Azure has built considerable momentum and is scaling quicker and faster with AI-led innovations. Microsoft is also clinching new partnerships to dent AWS’s dominance in IaaS. See how the Redmond tech titan is readying to take the cloud battle to the fiercest ground — the hybrid cloud.   Â
Cloud services have expanded in recent years to include multi-cloud and hybrid cloud options.
A hybrid cloud is sometimes the first choice for an enterprise that’s new to the cloud or facing security concerns. Operational processing remains on-premise with data stored in a local cloud; meanwhile, selected processing is deployed to a cloud services vendor as budgets and software development warrant.
Choosing multi-cloud allows a company to select specific cloud service vendors based upon a combination of performance, security or service needs. For example, mission-critical transaction processing can be directed to a vendor offering high-performance software-as-a-service (SaaS), while enterprise data warehouse and analytics are deployed to a high-volume storage vendor whose storage and CPU prices are more tolerable.
ZDNet reportsOpens a new window that enterprises are deploying more and more to multi-cloud environments, and AWS and Azure are the top two choices. As part of that report, Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2020 report noted that “Azure is narrowing the gap with AWS in their percentage of enterprises using it as well as the number of virtual machines.â€
The best multi-cloud providers will be the ones that can best assist customers by leveraging channel partners for platform management. As noted in another reportOpens a new window , AWS grew 35% in the last year, while Microsoft grew 59%.
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Microsoft Azure Matures Into the IaaS Space
IT Industry analyst Gartner named Microsoft a Leader in their 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT PlatformsOpens a new window . In that report, Azure was deemed a leader due to a “more completeness of visionâ€. AWS remained in the challenger category. Microsoft noted that a main driver for Gartner’s positioning of Microsoft as a leader was partially due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19.
John ‘JG’ Chirapurath, Vice President, Azure Data, AI & Edge, said, “Embracing digital transformation in Industrial IoT requires companies to rethink and shift business models and operations. Doing so, however, has become more difficult in the past six months due to production slowdowns, restrictions on employee movement with social distancing, and rapidly shifting market demands. Yet for many companies, the industry disruptions caused by COVID-19 have actually accelerated integral transformation in emerging technology directly linked to IoT, such as AI and edge computing. Manufacturers preparing for the future are rapidly building their operations around a digital core and actively integrating their value chain to the whole supply chain, doing so to increase efficiency and production capacity.â€
In a further review of public cloud IaaS vendor Azure, GartnerOpens a new window stated that, “Microsoft Azure is a top notch infrastructure as a service cloud platform which is growing day by day. Microsoft has brought a lot of its focus on this platform in the last few years and have introduced some very cool new features and improvements …â€.
Microsoft Positions Itself Against AWS
How is Microsoft planning on distinguishing itself from Amazon AWS offerings? Learning a lesson from Google Cloud, they plan to offer service solutions, including machine learning and AI. Another difference is that Azure has a large software-as-a-service (SaaS) footprint that includes MS Dynamics, Teams, and Office 365.Â
Microsoft’s legacy as a part of most enterprise software means that it is a natural vendor for considering cloud services. Also, its Azure Data Box EdgeOpens a new window , a data transfer appliance and service, allows for clean and easy upload and download of data to and from Azure.
Also, Microsoft has partnered with several server vendors, such as VMWare to create vertically integrated hardware/ software stacks targeting the market for hybrid clouds to combine on-premise and remote cloud deployments.
 In summary, Microsoft has a presence at many IT enterprises. Will those companies go multi-cloud and want a single cloud service provider? Several companies have already made this choice, including SalesForce for its marketing cloud.
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Can Azure Handle the Load?
Azure has suffered various outages of various types in the past. In January 2019, customers in Europe lost access to some Office 365 and Azure services. In May 2019. a nearly three-hour DNS outage affected Azure. Cloud-based solutions tend to be quite resilient in handling physical hardware outages; however, network DNS issues and DDoS attacks can affect major portions of a cloud’s infrastructure.
Microsoft will need to up its game by adding resources and doing contingency planning for potential outages on its Azure platform before a new service like Cloud PC will be seen as viable.
Indeed, this is why several major IT enterprises implemented internal clouds, where storage and processing were handled by on-premise equipment while expressing themselves as cloud-based services to clients. While these solutions tend to be quite costly in terms of equipment footprint, software licenses and staff resources, the internal cloud has one big advantage — all security, software management and performance monitoring is centralized in-house.
How Can AWS Respond?
A bundle of AWS services that nearly matches the client configuration of Azure tends to be more expensive. As one example, as of early 2020 the low-cost tier for Windows machines is about $10 (US) for Azure but about $25 (US) for AWS. To compensate for its higher price, AWS includes a 12 month free special pricing tier for any enterprise that uses the Amazon virtual desktop environment.
One area in which AWS needs to catch up is in Azure’s Site Recovery offering. This provides multiple recovery/failover options at low cost.
Learn More: Cloud Misconfigurations: A Surging but Overlooked Threat Â
Plan for the Future
Your competitors are looking at or have already implemented hybrid or multi-cloud deployments as part of their IaaS and SaaS strategy. As these solutions become commonplace, your IT infrastructure needs to mature into this environment. Choosing your cloud service provider just became more complex, as Microsoft Azure now challenges the dominance of Amazon AWS.
Can Microsoft Azure edge out AWS in the cloud wars? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!