Microsoft Azure: Clear leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide

If you are considering how or whether or not, you should leverage the cloud – it’s time to take a look at what Microsoft’s Cloud (Azure) can deliver to your business. For years, Amazon has been at the forefront of cloud innovation. They have no doubt been a major player in this arena and will continue to be for many years to come. However, there is more to the cloud than Amazon has to offer.

What you may not know is that Microsoft has more data centers globally than Amazon & Google combined – they are 100% committed to the cloud-first, mobile-first journey as communicated many times by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO.

Let’s take a quick look at why a trusted third party, Gartner, has recognized Microsoft’s Cloud as being a leader in Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Cloud Storage Services, and Application Platform as a Service (PaaS).

​Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide (Source: Gartner — August 2016)

Whether you are a small, mid-size or enterprise leveraging hybrid cloud (connecting to an on-premise data center) or going all-in completely to the cloud — at the core of it all is the infrastructure.

Why? It’s where you gain the greatest flexibility (scale up/down resources), the highest level of security, redundancy, and financially backed service level agreements for uptime — just to name a few.

It is Microsoft that is in fact giving Amazon some much needed competition in this space. See for yourself.