The cloud breakdown: Amazon, Microsoft, and everyone else

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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.

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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.

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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:

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Rightscale

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

And Microsoft is weaker among smaller businesses:

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Rightscale

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

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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>>

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

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