today’s cloud marketplace is dominated by two titans ...;05

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Clash of the Titans

vs.

Today’s cloud marketplace is dominated by two titans: Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).


Choosing the Right Cloud

So, how’s a company to choose betweenthe two? To put it simply: smart companies don’tchoose. In fact, most are leveraging thecapabilities of both for greater flexibility and riskmitigation.

But a comparison between the two is still a justand important activity, especially when determiningwhich workloads to run on which clouds orhow to augment a current AWS environmentwith Azure (or vice versa).

While both of these leading platforms sharesimilar elements of the public cloud, similarcapabilities, and similar investments in growingtheir capabilities, there are key differences thatmust be analyzed against a company's specificrequirements.

The common wisdom is that AWS offers flexibilityto its customers – meaning they can havewhatever they want, with the only catch beingthey have to build it and, for the most part,service it. Azure, on the other hand, allows itscustomers to enjoy the familiar Microsoft stackvery easily, but when it comes to venturingbeyond is when the work becomes a little trickier.

Boasting one million customers (including Netflix,Pinterest and Adobe Systems) and availability in33 regions, AWS is clearly dominant – yetcontinues to be unable to offer high availabilityservices, SLA-backed managed services or evensingle-team support. Customers also can’tachieve visibility across multiple platforms. In fact,one of the key reasons HOSTING developed theUnified Cloud model is to address the many‘holes’ in third party public clouds, AWS included.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft Azure is making a majorplay for AWS market share. And – withits open and secure cloud environment andworldwide network of data centers – it has alreadyproven successful with more than two-thirds of theFortune 500. At the same time, Azure has yet tocome anywhere close to Amazon's datacentercapacity. It also doesn't have quite the sameglobal reach, though is available in 140 countries,supporting 10 languages and 24 currencies.

At the time of this writing, AWS is the undisputed winner of the battle, with annual sales projected to reach $10 billion within the next year.


1Learning Curves. Azure is arguably easier and faster to get started on, with Microsoft

often stating in its marketing materials that "You'll be productive your first day in the cloud."

AWS, on the other hand, has long had a reputation as a platform for professionals, with less support for non-experts (and their staffs) than perhaps is necessary for true efficiency and ease of innovation.

2Seamless Connections.Microsoft asserts that Azure (unlike AWS) lets you easily

build hybrid applications that leverage resources in your data center, at service providers and within Azure itself.

An interesting side note is that Azure also recently introduced a new hybrid cloud platform – the Microsoft Azure Stack – to enable companies to deliver Azure services from their own data centers.

3Risk Mitigation. As the first cloud provider to adopt the international standards

for cloud privacy, Microsoft is leading the industry with its commitment to protect customer data.

AWS, however, has a (perhaps undeserved) reputation for being somewhat dismissive of its customers' wants to keep data in on-premise private clouds, and some argue its hybrid cloud strategy reflects that.

Here are some more ways they stack up

The key takeaway from all of these data points? AWS has many benefits and sodoes Azure, and most companies benefit from using both for different workloads.

The key to making sense of it? It all comes down to third-party management.Sometimes it’s best to leverage a service provider to manage public (and private)clouds – and especially hybrid environments. The complexity, risk and securityissues are often too much burden to place on an individual company’s IT team.

To find out more about Azure and AWS, using them together, and the ways a venerated managed service provider can help, visit HOSTINGUnifiedCloud.com.

today’s cloud marketplace is dominated by two titans ...;05

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