AWS remains top in cloud infrastructure services amid pressure from competition

Overall cloud infrastructure market grew more than 50 per cent in Q2 2016

Amazon Web Services is still the leader in cloud infrastructure services, according to recent market figures from Canalys. But it is facing increased pressure from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Softlayer.

According to the figures, AWS accounted for 30.4 per cent of the total spend on cloud infrastructure services in Q2 2016.

Canalys attributed AWS's success to its "early mover advantage, aggressive pricing, broad geographic coverage and wide range of service offerings." But the analyst said it is "under growing pressure" from Azure, Google Cloud and Softlayer.

All four companies combined account for 60.5 per cent of spending.

Canalys Research Analyst Daniel Liu said: "Not every organisation and every workload will migrate to the cloud. Cost is a major issue, but also compliance and regulations, security concerns, and application readiness are determining factors in cloud migration strategies. The adoption of hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions is prevalent as organisations seek to get the best of both worlds."

The overall cloud infrastructure market grew 52.3 per cent in Q2 2016, which Canalys attributed in part to the ongoing adoption of the cloud into business systems. The total value of the market in Q2 was $9.5bn (£7.2bn).

North America was the largest market, contributing 55.3 per cent of the worldwide spending. EMEA made up 24.7 per cent of the overall spending.

Liu added: "The need for scalable and on-demand infrastructure is being driven by application testing, development and hosting; content delivery, big data and analytics; machine learning, IoT, disaster recovery and back-up, plus storage."