Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud computing company providing a service known as S3, has a massive lead over the rest of the industry. In the past 12 months, AWS gas generated over $8 billion — more than quadruple that of Microsoft’s Azure’s $1.8 billion, and 15 times the sales from Google’s cloud services.
And that’s not all — AWD has seen an impressive 72% year-over-year growth, which is completely unknown of for an enterprise service of its size.
Although the current numbers and AWD’s massive lead are quite significant, the estimates for Microsoft and Google are merely estimates. The numbers are in for AWS because they launched their services much earlier than the other two companies. Also not factored into the comparisons are Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar cloud software business.
At this point, with 87% of companies operating in the cloud, the industry represents many interests and is the intersection of several industries. Amazon Web Services hold a lot of that responsively, hosting twice as much customer data as the top seven other public cloud providers combined.
Indeed, Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant report assessed several cloud vendors according to their vision in cloud storage and their ability to fulfill goals. The companies are then ranked relative to each other, taking into account core services, sales strategy, and geographic coverage. The study found that Amazon S3 stores 1.6 times the amount of data of all the other players in the study.
Amazon S3 (which stands for Simple Storage Service) launched in 2006. It offers archival services called Glacier, which stores companies cold data. While many of its services are lauded for their ease and quality, many companies recognize that while it is easy to put dates into the system, it can be quite pricey to take them out. For now, though, AWS’ S3 services still reign supreme.