Hyperscale cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google are accelerating efforts to target on-premises enterprise workloads, setting the stage for an intensely competitive hybrid cloud solutions market in 2019.

Chris Drake, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his take on the implications of these developments and the longer-term challenges and opportunities facing leading cloud service providers as they target on-premises and hybrid cloud workloads:

“In 2019, businesses and other organizations will make increasing use of hybrid cloud environments to support a range of IT and application requirements. Major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle and Alibaba, are responding to the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions with versions of their public cloud technology designed to be deployed privately, within customers’ data centers.

“Although AWS is the largest provider of public cloud services globally, this does not guarantee its success in the hybrid cloud space. AWS already has several options for organizations that require a hybrid cloud solution and, in late 2019, AWS plans to launch a new managed on-premises version of its cloud platform called AWS Outposts. However, information on component services and pricing has yet to be provided.

“Microsoft is hedging its hybrid cloud bet on its Azure Stack offering, delivered with a choice of on-premises hardware and using the same development and management tools to provide consistency across private Azure Stack deployments and the Azure public cloud. However, criticisms of Azure Stack include its considerably slimmed-down feature set compared with the features, services and capabilities that are available with Microsoft Azure.

“Oracle, IBM, Google, Alibaba and other public cloud providers also have solutions that are designed to help them target enterprise private and hybrid cloud workloads. Given this expansive range of solutions and initiatives, the market for hybrid cloud solutions will become intensely competitive with vendors competing in several fields, including the provision of solutions that are tailored for specific user groups, workloads, and use cases. Vendors will also compete on things such as cloud performance, availability, scalability, cost and manageability, and on the provision of tools for application developers and DevOps initiatives.”