Highlights

AWS Dominates IT Pro Voting

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was selected as Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation Leader for all 14 IaaS product categories.

Azure and IBM Perceived as Best of the Rest

Microsoft Azure was chosen runner-up for Market Leader in 8 product categories. IBM Cloud placed second in 3 service categories.

Respect Shown for On-Premises Leaders Offering Services

NetApp places second in various brand leader categories for SSD and Block Storage. VMware places third in some brand leader categories for Virtual Servers-as-a-Service.

Category Where AWS was Most Dominant

The Biggest Spread Between First and Second Place is in the Object Storage-as-a-Service Market Leader category where the spread between AWS and Azure is 41%

Category Where Competition was Closest to AWS

Microsoft Azure closing in on AWS for Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service Market Leader, trailing by only 7% in IT Pro voting.

About the Survey

The 2018 IaaS brand leader surveys cover fourteen Infrastructure-as-a-Service products. The survey report includes the results of IT Pro voting for six categories of brand leadership for each service: Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation.

1. Auto Scaling-as-a-Service: Lets you automatically change the number of instances providing a particular compute workload. You set defined metric and thresholds that determine if the platform adds or removes instances.
2. Backup & Restore-as-a-Service: Backup and archival solutions allow files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provide off-site protection against data loss. There are two components of backup—the software service that orchestrates backup/retrieval and the underlying backup storage infrastructure.
3. Batch Computing-as-a-Service: Run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing applications efficiently in the cloud.
4. Block Storage-as-a-Service: Data stored in volumes and blocks, where files are split into evenly sized blocks. Each block has its own address, but unlike objects they do not have metadata.
5. Bulk Data Transfer-as-a-Service: A data transport solution that uses secure disks and appliances to transfer large amounts of data. Also offers data protection during transit.
6. Cold Storage-as-a-Service: Cold storage is a lower cost tier for storing data that is infrequently accessed and long-lived.
7. Containers-as-a-Service: Quickly deploy a production ready Kubernetes, DC/OS, or Docker Swarm cluster.
8. Dedicated Servers-as-a-Service: Instances that run on hardware that’s dedicated to a single customer.
9. Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service: Automates protection and replication of virtual machines. Offers health monitoring, recovery plans, and recovery plan testing.
10. File Storage-as-a-Service: Provides a simple interface to create and configure file systems quickly, and share common files. It’s shared file storage without the need for a supporting virtual machine, and can be used with traditional protocols that access files over a network.
11. Object Storage-as-a-Service: Object storage service, for use cases including cloud applications, content distribution, backup, archiving, disaster recovery, and big data analytics.
12. Serverless-as-a-Service: Integrate systems and run back end processes in response to events or schedules without provisioning or managing servers.
13. SSD-as-a-Service: High performance SSD storage.
14. Virtual Servers-as-a-Service: Virtual servers allow users to deploy, manage, and maintain OS and server software. Instance types provide combinations of CPU/RAM. Users pay for what they use with the flexibility to change sizes.