Public cloud players are showing solid growth as the multi-cloud pie expands

Cloud computing in 2021 has become the de facto choice of IT due to digital transformation shifts accelerated by remote work and the COVID-19 pandemic. Enterprises are seeing the cloud as a digital transformation engine as well as a technology that improves business continuity. As cloud providers increasingly are landing multiple workloads and use cases, spending is surging accordingly. While enterprises are deploying more multi-cloud arrangements the IT budgets are increasingly going to cloud giants. According to a recent survey from Flexera money is flowing toward Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud Platform is also garnering interest for big data and analytics workloads. For instance, 16% spend more than $12 million on AWS with 14% spending more than that sum on Azure and 8% on Google Cloud. Flexera projects that cloud spending will grow 39% overall with companies struggling to maintain budgets.

50% of enterprises have significant workloads on AWS with 41% running those significant workloads on Azure. Google Cloud has a 22% share for significant workloads. But hybrid cloud and traditional data center vendors such as IBM, Dell Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and VMware have a role too.

Companies are well aware of vendor lock-in and want to abstract their applications so they can be moved across clouds. 92% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy with 80% following a hybrid cloud approach and also 49% of enterprises silo workloads by cloud with 45% integrating data across clouds. Among public clouds, platform-as-a-service usage is accelerating. Top public cloud services used by enterprises include:

· Data warehouse

· DBaaS (relational)

· Container-as-a-service

· DBaaS (NoSQL)

Amazon Web Services was the first to offer cloud computing infrastructure as a service in 2008. It’s launching new services at a breakneck pace and is creating its own compute stack that aims to be more efficient and pass those savings along. For now, AWS is everything from a key AI and machine learning platform to call center engine to edge compute enabler.

The real battle between AWS and Microsoft Azure will revolve around enterprises that go multi-cloud but want one preferred cloud service vendor. Microsoft is a known commodity that can plug into Salesforce, which picked Azure for its Marketing Cloud, as well as other incumbents such as SAP, Oracle, and Adobe. At the same time, Google Cloud Platform is working to break into digital transformation budgets. Google rushed into the video conferencing market with Google Meet and this is getting a lift to set up a strategy to manage multi-cloud workloads. In 2021, you can expect Google Cloud to continue to expand its footprint.

Every flavor of cloud vendor wants to be a management layer to manage your other clouds. Public cloud vendors such as Google Cloud Platform and AWS have offerings to manage various cloud services. Traditional enterprise vendors such as Dell and HPE do too. Which platform will become that “single pane of glass” for cloud management?