Choosing the right public Cloud provider is an ongoing challenge for businesses and specifically regarding their enterprise applications in production.
Security and compliancy remain the most important criteria that support companies decision making.
The top five IaaS/PaaS public clouds ranked by 451 Alliance are AWS (in use at 76% of the companies), Microsoft Azure (74%), Google Cloud Platform (27%), following by IBM Cloud (12%) Oracle Cloud (8%), and Rackspace (8%)
Looking more closely at vendors evaluation criteria, AWS emerges as the clear winner in terms of meeting users’ expectations, including infrastructure availability and uptime. (44%)
Business are more and more looking for value added features and are even ready to pay extra for threat detection and compliancy. The public cloud ranking provided by 451 research reveals that Microsoft Azur bested AWS for “Security and Compliancy” (24% vs 19%). Google and Oracle get the worst rating.
When analyzing cloud providers ranking, it’s important to make distinction between perceptions attributes, (i.e value for money), and fact attributes (i.e availability and uptime). Mixing perception and facts attributes in vendors evaluation can indeed lead with ambiguous results.
On the same way, it’s very important to understand exactly what‘s behind the attributes. Mixing compliancy and security attributes for vendors's evaluation can indeed be hazardous. Are we talking about security compliancy or about legal compliancy?
Even if Amazon and Microsoft rule the roost, the public Cloud landscape leaves a room for alternative cloud providers that will be able to provide the market with advanced tools for threat detection, compliancy features and services migration (for instance by using IA & Machine learning)