In a hard-hitting battle between the big giants, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, the former seems to have garnered the crown of success, astonishing all, as per the latest survey released by the end of March 2017. It was carried out by the UBM Research Center and authorized by Sumo Logic, a data analytics provider.

The research was based on over 230 IT professionals from companies having more than 500 employees. Research revealed that 80 percent of enterprises are either into cloud solutions or planning to switch. The research figures also provided a surprising fact that many companies are using more than one cloud service.

About two-thirds, 66 percent of survey participants admitted to using Azure while 55 percent are into AWS. Google ranked fifth with 20 percent, IBM fourth with 23 percent and Salesforce App ranked third with 28 percent. The survey confirms that among all, Azure stands out as the users’ best choice of enterprises having more than 10,000 employees.

It is to be noted that in all the past surveys AWS has been a chartbuster of the public cloud provider. It predominated the market until this survey when Azure broke all records. It can be argued that just 230 IT professionals, cannot be an ideal number to be a trendsetter, yet it implies that the inclination towards Microsoft shows the rise of a leader in the market. The survey figures show, that 67 percent are using SaaS, whereas 40 percent are into IaaS or PaaS.

Even the growing popularity of DevOps is not unknown to us. It is a combination of software development and information technology operations brought together for better and automated software application development and deployment. The UBM Research found in its survey that 68 percent are either planning to adopt DevOps or have already adopted it. 42 percent of the researched users are said to have deployed applications more frequently than in the past, while only 8 percent said they are deploying applications less than, what they did earlier.

However, as cloud computing becomes standard in IT organizations, security concerns persist for all enterprises and business houses trying to adopt it. They all look for the security of their data, particularly for critical and sensitive data. On being asked about the toughest challenges, security received the majority with a count of 27 percent.

55 percent of the surveyed members believe that public cloud services are more secure than they used to be, shattering the belief that only private cloud or on-premises private cloud is secure. Rather, 6 percent described that the security of the public cloud has these days become far better than what it was previously

Moreover, the pain points like migrating applications and data migration are felt by a total of 15 percent of the adopters, 8 percent by the traditional IT infrastructure, and 7 percent by those managing cloud-based apps and operations.

A large number of enterprises are embracing an extensive suite of cloud services and to make a choice from such a wide array of compelling offerings, the decision is not going to be easy

Courtesy: Computerworld