The cloud is getting bigger and more important by the hour. However, the cloud giants have developed different, though overlapping strategies. The best example is probably MS Azure vs. Amazon Web Services. Looks like Microsoft is doing everything in order
to promote the hybrid cloud. MS wants of course to establish a position of trusted supplier for their customers in the cloud space too, helping them with establishing and administrating their clouds. This makes a lot of sense in some cases, probably in the case of Microsoft’s most valuable B2B customers. On the other hand, Amazon wants (almost) everything to be running on the public cloud because in the B2B arena, its position was far weaker in the beginning. In the mid-tem, an interesting consequence of these different strategies may be a natural segmentation of the cloud market, where MS and AMZ target different kind of customers based on their different size and complexity of operations.
Large organizations may experience an increase in shadow IT, where the IT department centrally decides to go for the MS Azure model, while some departments of the same company rejects the policy and prefer establishing direct relations with AWS. This dual behavior is nothing wrong in itself, but should be framed on operational and financial efficiency agreed across the organization.