Amazon.com Inc has grown cloud computing revenues for four consecutive quarters, an excellent trend that analysts say allayed concerns that a consumer shift to other cloud vendors might undermine the company’s dominant market dominance.
Industry authorities’ warnings about the need to reduce risk, as well as some high-profile cloud outages, have prompted some corporate IT teams to adopt a multi-cloud strategy. Diversification can also result in lower costs and more backup choices.
However, Amazon’s strong cloud performance, which was a key part of its forecast-beating quarterly results on Thursday, highlights the cloud industry’s healthy expansion, especially among the larger companies.
According to Synergy Research Group forecasts, overall spending on cloud infrastructure services increased 37 percent to $178 billion in 2021, exceeding 34 percent growth the year before.
Canalys pegged their shares at 33% for AWS, 22% for Azure and 9% for Google.
“Multicloud doesn’t mean spreading your wealth across multiple clouds,” said Sid Nag, a vice president at tech advisory firm Gartner. “There’s still a primary cloud you’re doing most of your business with.”
Capital One, which has said it was the first major U.S. bank to fully ditch data centers for the cloud and struck an early deal with AWS, is a case in point.
While it has adopted Google and Azure for some needs, it has expanded with AWS to become one of its larger users, according to two people familiar with the matter. They declined to be identified due to confidentiality agreements.
AWS said that a multi-cloud approach ultimately generates headaches for customers. “AWS has proven its reliability,” it said in a statement.
