Amazon continues to dominate cloud storage biz: Gartner

Seattle-headquartered Amazon Web Services (AWS) continued to dominate the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space in 2018 with a market share of nearly 50%, according to a report by Gartner.

AWS was followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM, the report said. The report also said the top five vendors accounted for nearly 77% of the global IaaS market share. The global market grew at a rate of 31.3% in 2018. 

Companies across the IaaS cloud space (which primarily offers storage facilities on the cloud) have continued to build on the momentum by deploying new services, revamping their offerings and driving research and development spending to meet client demands.

AWS plans to widen the margin between itself and competitors by making in-roads into new markets, acquisitions and building on its core-cloud business, the report added.

Microsoft continued to be a distant second to the market leader but revenue from the IaaS cloud business crossed $5 billion for the first time in 2018. Microsoft Azure continued to bridge the gap between itself and AWS’s IaaS offering, the report said.

Alibaba Cloud saw the strongest growth among the five leading IaaS vendors as it grew over 92% in 2018. The Jack Ma-led conglomerate’s cloud division has devised an ecosystem supplemented by managed service providers and independent software vendors, the report said.

“Despite strong growth across the board, the cloud market’s consolidation favours the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share. This is an indication that scalability matters when it comes to the public cloud IaaS business,” Sid Nag, research vice president, Gartner, said. 

A report released in May by Frost & Sullivan found that demand in the cloud IaaS market is likely to treble to $150 billion by 2023. Findings of the report suggested that the cloud is being harnessed for bringing about digital transformation.

IT industry lobby Nasscom's report in April almost echoed the Frost & Sullivan study findings. It pegged the Indian cloud computing market to triple by 2022. The report also found that the IaaS segment dominated the cloud market. 

Last month, another report by Gartner found that a shift among enterprises from a cloud-first to a cloud-only model has incentivised spending on cloud services to drive their digital transformation.