While cloud adoption is growing across the board, Microsoft is increasingly closing the gap with Amazon Web Services, according to a recently published survey of 750 professionals, while Google Cloud is seeing the fastest growth among large businesses.
The report, which IT management firm Flexera conducts annually, surveyed cloud decision makers from organizations with 100 to over 10,000 employees between October and November 2020.
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are competing toe-to-toe, with 76% of respondents saying they use AWS and 73% of respondents using Microsoft. Google Cloud took third place at 47%, while Oracle's cloud took fourth place at 29%. (Percentages add up to much greater than 100% because many respondents use multiple clouds.)
Google Cloud — which has invested heavily in hybrid cloud and building a bigger salesforce — saw especially high growth among enterprises, defined as companies with 1,000 or more workers.
Nearly half (49%) of enterprise respondents said they use Google Cloud, up 15% from the previous report. In comparison, Azure usage grew to 76% this year from 69% last year, and AWS usage grew to 79% from 76% last year.
Google Cloud could have also gained customers by changing its pricing tactics, the New Stack's Lawrence Hecht pointed out based on the survey data.
In this year's survey, 48% of respondents said they got ad hoc negotiated discounts from Google Cloud, compared to 18% from last year's report. Insider also previously reported that partners say Google Cloud has gotten more flexible in its contract negotiations, like allowing them to apply credits intended for one Google Cloud service to other services and bundling together products.
In addition, 26% of respondents reported ad hoc negotiated discounts from AWS, up 20% from last year.
The gap between AWS and Azure is bigger when respondents were asked specifically about significant workloads: Half of enterprise respondents said they run significant workloads on AWS, while 44% of respondents said they run them on Microsoft. In comparison, 23% of enterprise respondents said they run significant workloads on Google Cloud.
AWS dominates for small and medium sized businesses with less than 1,000 employees: 53% of respondents from those businesses say they run significant workloads on AWS, compared to 22% on Azure and 20% on Google Cloud. A recent survey by Bank of America similarly found small businesses using AWS most frequently, which it attributed "perhaps due to how accessible/easy it is to spin up an AWS instance using just a credit card."
Overall, half of all respondents from all company sizes run significant workloads on AWS, compared to 41% on Azure and 22% on Google Cloud.
That lines up, directionally, with Gartner's most recent report on cloud giant market share, which showed that AWS held 45% of the market, compared to 17.9% for Microsoft, and 5.3% for Google Cloud.
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