Like it or not, cloud computing has fundamentally altered the commercial relationship between organizations and information technology (IT) providers. Businesses—and even the federal government—are no longer architecting data centers, or storing data on servers in the basement or a closet. Rather, the majority of businesses today are somewhere along the path of cloud migration; some wading in cautiously with just a few software applications and others, especially new businesses, going “cloud native” from the start.
The big cloud service providers (CSPs) offer everything from basic computer essentials like processing power, storage space and networking, to a huge and relentlessly growing catalog of other services providing “cutting-edge” technologies e.g., artificial intelligence, voice control, and “serverless” computing (aka “Function-as-a-Service”). The capabilities these services offer thus enabled to automate and deploy rapid and cost-effective scaling, in sync with data flows and demands, as well as the potential security benefits, makes the risk and cost of following the “on-prem” model (short for the on-premises, traditional model of capital investment in IT infrastructure) much less palatable than the alternative of on-demand, pay-per-use services from technology giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure (Azure). While Azure is giving chase to AWS, achieving astounding growth by leveraging Microsoft’s historically embedded relationships with enterprise customers, AWS is the leading CSP in global market share by a margin that seems insurmountable for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, the discussion below focuses on AWS as the originator and leader in the category of enterprise CSPs.
