The market leading cloud provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS)with a wide distance second in the industry, Microsoft Azure. But this distance is shrinking more and more, since according to data from the consulting firm Gartner, Azure is gradually eating up the ground to AWS, and reducing the distance that separates the division in the Microsoft cloud from that of AWS.
Amazon Web Services had 40.8% of the infrastructure market as a service (IaaS), but in 2021 this share had fallen to 38.9%. Meanwhile, Azure, which in 2021 had 19.7% of the market, managed to reach 21.1% in 2021. Of course, the five main cloud providers in the sector continue to share the vast majority of the market. Together they account for 80.2% of the total.
The cloud sector is in full expansion and growth, which shows its growth between 2020 and 2021: 41.4%, with revenues that have gone from 64.3 billion dollars in 2021 to 90.9 billion dollars in 2021. And the fastest growing provider of the top five in 2021 was Google Cloud. Nothing less than 63.7%, until reaching 6,400 million dollars.
The growth of Google’s cloud division has been due primarily to the growing adoption of the cloud for traditional workloads in the enterprise. Also to his work on emerging features such as Artificial Intelligence and container technologies such as Kubernetes. In addition, the consultancy also highlights its partner ecosystem as one of its pillars for growth, which is allowing it to reach a broader customer base.
But not only these three providers are increasing their revenues and growing in infrastructure services as a service. Alibaba, the third largest ahead of Google Cloud, has had revenues of 8,700 million dollars in its cloud division, and has a market share of 9.5%. The company continues to lead the market in China, and is poised to be the top provider in Indonesia, Malaysia and other emerging cloud markets as well. Mainly, according to Gartner, due to its knowledge of the local market and its ability to serve as a bridge for digital commerce.
The fifth ranked huawei, has slowed its growth in 2021 after two years in a row with 200% growth. Thus, from 2020 to 2021 it has improved by 56.3%, and remains in fifth position among IaaS providers with 4.2 billion dollars in revenue in 2021.
Sid Nag, Vice President of Analytics at Gartnernotes that “The IaaS market continues to grow steadily, as cloud-native becomes the primary architecture for modern workloads. The cloud supports the scalability and composability required by advanced technologies and applications, while enabling enterprises to address emerging needs such as sovereignty, data integration, and improved customer experience.«.
