Worldwide spending on cloud infrastructure services continues to grow, reaching US$17 billion in the first quarter of 2018. This represents a 47% increase on the same period last year. Amazon Web Services (AWS) stayed ahead of the competition, up 49% this quarter. The market leader’s revenue is nearly double that of its nearest competitor, Microsoft (up 93%), which continued to grow faster than AWS. Google was ranked third, up 89% to US$1.2 billion.
Cloud adoption has been a key part of businesses’ digital transformation strategies due to its multiple benefits, including elasticity, scalability, on-demand provision of virtualized and container resources, and low upfront costs. But complexity and uncontrolled user access to cloud technologies has led to customers underusing paid-for services and not fully realizing the return on investment. “According to a Canalys survey of 146 channel partners around the world, over 80% of respondents believe their customers’ cloud expenditure is not fully used,” said Daniel Liu, Research Analyst in Canalys. “58% of partners believe up to 20% of their customers’ cloud investment is wasted, while 26% think the wastage is more than 20%.”
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