The cloud breakdown: Amazon, Microsoft, and everyone else (AMZN, MSFT)

When Business Insider's Julie Bort talked recently to some big companies that were shutting down their own data centers and switching 100% to hosted cloud services, she found that they really only considered two companies serious players in the cloud today: Amazon and Microsoft. They were intrigued with Google, but more as an experiment.

A new survey from cloud management company Rightscale confirms this breakdown.

Rightscale surveyed more than 1,000 tech professionals to find out which public cloud providers they were using and considering.

Amazon is still way ahead — 57% of respondents are using its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, and another 25% are experimenting with it or plan to use it. That's compared with 20% who are using Microsoft Azure, and 44% who are experimenting or plan to use it:

Rightscale

The breakdown was slightly different for enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, with Microsoft much stronger in that space:

Rightscale

And Microsoft is weaker among smaller businesses:

Rightscale

This breakdown only applies to public cloud providers — that is, solutions that are entirely hosted on one of the cloud providers' systems.

Overall, Rightscale saw increasing use of so-called "private" clouds (which are basically just when a company runs its own infrastructure using certain technologies common with cloud providers, like virtualization) and "hybrid" clouds (which are when a combination of public and private clouds are used by the same business).

Download the whole report here>>

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