When the research firm Gartner releases it’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services we are always here to report it to you. Last week, we revealed that Gartner found that Microsoft Azure was in second place behind Amazon’s AWS in Cloud IaaS evaluation. Today, we can report that Gartner has found Microsoft as a Leader in the Public Cloud Storage Services Magic Quadrant.
As seen in their graphic above, Gartner overall finds that Microsoft is currently the most prominent competitor to Amazon Web Services from the perspective of enterprise adoption. The research firm also finds that Microsoft has a strong enterprise focus, a solid understanding of enterprises’ needs, and the resources in place globally to serve them well.
Microsoft’s public efforts to support non-Microsoft technologies such as Linux and iOS, using Azure’s services, is also a strength, according to the research firm. Gartner’s other top reasons include the following:
- Most enterprise customers that are considering Microsoft Azure also evaluate AWS — even for workloads based on Windows.
- Application developers who use tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET will find a well-integrated experience from the perspective of developing and building to deploying and running applications on Azure.
- When customers choose Microsoft Azure, their existing relationships with Microsoft and/or their channel partner play an important role.
- The Microsoft Azure storage offerings feature block, file and object storage services that address a wide range of workloads, but they are mostly behind AWS’s service capabilities, adoption and mind share.
- Microsoft’s Azure File Storage service, currently the only public cloud-based managed service that supports server message block (SMB), is a widely used storage protocol that allows applications to be “lifted and shifted” to Azure.
As many strengths as Gartner finds, the firm also has some cautions for Microsoft. One of them is the fact that Microsoft claims a large number of regions where Azure is available, but not all storage services are available in each region. According to Gartner, other cautions include the fact that porting an application to use Microsoft Azure’s Blob storage service will require significant investment in an API whose adoption is a fraction of that of Amazon S3. The final caution is that Microsoft is an innovation laggard, trailing behind AWS in both breadth and depth of public cloud storage service offerings.
Microsoft’s cloud services remain a vital component of the company’s “cloud-first, moble-first” strategy, and it’s good to see Gartner continuing to recognize Microsoft as a leader in the space. Let us know in the comments whether you agree with Gartner that Microsoft is a Leader in Cloud Storage Services.
