Microsoft Azure trailing behind Amazon AWS with 19% cloud market share in Q1 2021

Canalys recently released its latest report on the global cloud services market. According to the report, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the leading cloud service provider with a 32% market share in Q1 2021. Microsoft’s Azure was at 2nd position in the list with a 19% market share. It is important to note that Microsoft Azure grew 50% for the third consecutive quarter.

“Growth was boosted by cloud consumption and longer-term customer commitments enabled by investments in Azure Arc for hybrid-IT control plane management, Azure Synapse for data analytics, and AI as a platform,” wrote Canalys on Azure’s growth.

Competition among the leading cloud service providers to capitalize on these opportunities will continue to intensify. “Geographic expansion for data sovereignty and to improve latency, either via full-region deployment or a local city point of presence, is one area of focus for the cloud service providers,” said Canalys Chief Analyst Matthew Ball. “But differentiation through custom hardware development for optimized compute instances, industry-specific clouds, hybrid-IT management, analytics, databases and AI-driven services is increasing. But it is not just a contest between the cloud service providers, but also a race with the on-premises infrastructure vendors, such as Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo, which have established competitive as-a-service offerings. The challenge will be demonstrating a differentiated value proposition for each.”

Source: Canalys