Large-Business IT Pros Choosing Microsoft Azure More than AWS for Public Cloud

Written by Edward
March 28, 2017

A new survey commissioned by Sumo Logic shows 80 percent of IT professionals polled are using or plan to use public cloud services, while 66 percent are using Microsoft Azure, compared to 55 percent using AWS.

A new survey of IT professionals shows 80 percent currently use or plan to use public cloud services, while Microsoft Azure has overtaken Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the public cloud of choice.

Sumo Logic's Kalyan Ramanathan Commissioned by Sumo Logic and carried out by UBM Research, the survey involved 230 IT professionals from companies with 500 or more employees. Some two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents chose Azure, versus 55 percent selecting AWS.

Kalyan Ramanathan, Sumo Logic’s vice president of product marketing, tells Channel Partners the survey states that migration, gaining unified visibility and securing workloads in the cloud are the biggest challenges to cloud adoption.

“Few vendors have the capabilities and resources to help bridge these real-world challenges,” he said. “But channel partners and resellers can provide implementation and deployment offerings, value-added services and best practices in these disciplines to help enterprises adopt cloud more effectively and easily.”

Two-thirds are using software-as-a-service (SaaS), and about four out of 10 are using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and/or platform-as-a-service (PaaS), according to the survey.{ad}

In the early days of the cloud, AWS took the lead as the cloud computing vendor of choice; however, the survey shows that as the cloud matures, organizations are becoming more comfortable with vendors other than AWS and are using multiple cloud vendors.

While other reports show that AWS still has a lead in cloud market share, the top cloud vendor in this survey – which included only organizations with at least 500 employees – was Azure.

More than half of the Azure users were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft’s cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises, according to the survey. Outside of Azure and AWS, Salesforce App Cloud was third (28 percent), followed by IBM Cloud (23 percent) and Google Cloud (20 percent).

“Sumo Logic believes that enterprises tackling the shift to digital transformation are building modern apps to innovate, grow and satisfy rapidly changing customer demand,” Ramanathan said. “And these modern apps are built on elastic and scalable cloud environments and using DevOps and agile style practices.”

Other survey findings include:

Sixty-eight percent either plan to adopt DevOps practices or already are doing so.
Forty-two percent are deploying and updating apps more frequently than in the past.
Fifty-five percent said public cloud services are more secure than they used to be, but they still have room for improvement.
Most organizations are using between four and 10 tools to manage their growing portfolios of custom apps.

“Enterprises today use too many siloed tools (more than 60 percent of the enterprises use more than seven tools),” Ramanathan said. “This leads to inefficient application management, poor collaboration and high TCO. (The) channel organization can help consolidate and refine the tooling within the enterprise today by evangelizing unified solutions and best practices to improve DevOps efficiency, and reduce tool procurement and management costs. Bringing the right solutions to the enterprise also positions the channel as an advocate for the customer — leading to (a) richer and more profitable relationship.”