AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

The cloud accelerates an organization’s digital transformation through data democratization, app and infrastructure modernization, people connections, and trusted transactions. Organizations want to protect their employees, customers, and partners against emerging threats, analyze massive amounts of data to secure infrastructure, and build a long-term strategy for strategic governance of their assets regardless of their location. Amid the cloud spending boom, Microsoft Azure & AWS are gaining IT spending.

In fact, the three cloud giants now combine for approximately 65% of the total worldwide cloud infrastructure services market, which reached $54.7 billion in the second quarter of 2022. When we see the unique differentiation and the Go-To-Market strategy of these three biggies, Google Cloud was able to grow its revenue to $6.2 billion in Q2 2022 from $4.6 billion in Q2 2021. Google Cloud revenue grew 35.6% Year-Over-Year, the slowest pace of growth in at least 17 quarters. It fell short of analyst predictions for the quarter. Google Cloud is one of the tech giant's primary business segments, the other being Google Services.

One of the biggest things setting Google Cloud hosting apart from other players is their global network. It's easily one of the biggest in the world, rivaling the global infrastructure of both Microsoft and Amazon.

Whereas, Azure has more data centers and delivery points than most other cloud services. This allows Azure to deliver content faster and provide an optimal user experience. AWS is Amazon’s cloud infrastructure and platform services business, which includes more than 200 products and services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

AWS has the largest and most dynamic community, with millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally. In the first quarter of 2022, the cloud services arm of Amazon reported revenue growth of 37%, posting revenue of $18.44 billion.

At the same time, Microsoft Azure has used large-scale virtualization at Microsoft data centers worldwide while offering up to 600 different services. It is a pioneering leader for Infrastructure as a Service and has led to significant growth. Azure revenue growth percentage as well as sales figures for a segment dubbed Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud—which includes Azure public cloud for application hosting, SQL Server, Windows Server and enterprise services.

Microsoft's second quarter blew by expectations as its commercial cloud sales surged 34% en route to a $66.8 billion annual revenue run rate. The company cites its overall cloud sales as “Microsoft Cloud” although the generic term does not explain what it entails.

Meanwhile, all the three cloud providers have reported an increase in cloud revenue for the past quarter. Most of the cloud service providers have said they expect that the fear of a potential recession will slow down booking rates as enterprises take longer to work through deal terms and duration.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA