Microsoft Azure is now ahead of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in several areas, including the proportion of enterprises using the cloud service, according to a new report from IT management solution provider Flexera.
In the company’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera gives data on the enterprise cloud market, finding that Azure has surpassed AWS in the percentage of enterprises using it — 80% for Azure against 77% for AWS.
In addition, Azure is also now ahead of AWS in the number of virtual machines enterprises are running, with 71% of enterprises running more than 51 virtual machines on Azure, compared to 69% of AWS.
Azure also edged out AWS in spending, as 53% of enterprise Azure users spend at least $1.2 million annually, compared with 52% for AWS.
In private clouds, Azure is also making moves, with Microsoft Azure Stack increasing slightly to 37% and taking over the top spot from VMware vSphere, which now sits at 31%.
However, Flexera’s report also indicated that enterprises aren’t taking advantage of all available discounts for the two cloud services. In fact, the number of respondents who say they’re leveraging discounts has dropped, as 36% of AWS users use reserved instances and 31% use savings plans, which is down from 52% and 44% last year, respectively.
Likewise, just 32% of Azure users utilize reserved instances.
That is important as cloud costs continue to grow, with organizations over budget for cloud spending by an average of 13%. Cloud spending is expected to increase by 29% this year, the report found, suggesting that organizations aren’t any closer to setting realistic cloud budgets.
According to Flexera, waste is a big issue with cloud spend, as organizations estimate they waste 32% of their cloud spend.
Respondents indicated that native orchestration and container management tools such as AWS Cloud Formation and Azure Resource Manager are becoming easier to use and are pushing out third-party tools, with those two tools the most widely adopted by respondents at 50% and 48%, respectively.
Azure Resource Manager seems to be more popular among enterprise users at 52%, while AWS CloudFormation has the highest SMB usage at 47%. Meanwhile, third-party tool usage is declining, with notable tools such as Terraform, Ansible and Salt/SaltStack all declining in usage.
In a statement, Brian Adler, senior director of cloud market strategy at Flexera, said the cloud must play a significant role in any organization’s digital transformation.
“The cloud helps enterprises scale, be more agile, increase revenue and achieve business goals. We’ve seen that cloud adoption has been expanding for the past few years, with a great acceleration by the pandemic,” Adler said. “However, in the post-pandemic world that we’re shaping, we’re seeing new trends coming into focus.”
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