Infrastructure as a Service – Global Providers

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) assesses cloud service providers (CSPs) that deliver services across multiple geopolitical regions, including the EU/EEA, with particular emphasis on security and compliance from a European perspective. IaaS is positioned as a foundation for hybrid IT, enabling enterprises to run compute and storage in the cloud while retaining responsibility for operating systems, applications, and regulatory compliance, under a shared-responsibility model where the CSP secures and operates the underlying infrastructure. The report highlights core enterprise use cases—DevOps, external-facing applications, hybrid workloads and data, analytics and machine learning (including IoT-scale ingestion), and disaster recovery—each with distinct priorities.

Evaluation criteria span basic service functionality; enterprise and hybrid workload enablement (including secure connectivity, workload placement controls, VMware support, and cloud bursting); DevOps tooling (containers, CI/CD, rollback, security testing); analytics/AI/IoT capabilities; availability resilience (technical and non-technical risks, SLAs, backup and standby); compliance support (certifications, data residency assurances, breach/legal access transparency); data protection (IAM standards, directory integration, encryption and key management); cyber security controls (monitoring, separation, incident response, and security tooling); and consulting services.

Overall leaders are AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, with Virtustream a product leader for enterprise-grade SLAs. AWS is characterized by breadth, rapid innovation, Nitro security architecture, extensive global regions/zones, and strong compliance posture. Microsoft emphasizes integrated IaaS/PaaS and hybrid via Azure Stack, while IBM’s hybrid strategy is strengthened by Red Hat and Cloud Paks. Oracle differentiates with Generation 2 architecture and autonomous database operations but is noted as having fewer compliance certifications. The report observes weak correlation between market dominance and product maturity in an evolving segment, and growing demand for managed services because hybrid multi-cloud often increases, rather than reduces, enterprise management complexity.

• Global scale in this report means service availability in multiple geopolitical regions including the EU/EEA.
• Overall leaders are Amazon Web Services, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.
• Product leaders are Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Virtustream.
• Innovation leaders are Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
• Market leaders are Amazon Web Services, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.
• AWS has 66 availability zones within 21 geographic regions, plus one local region, and has announced 12 more availability zones and 4 more regions: Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta, and Milan.
• Microsoft Azure is delivered from 54 regions globally, with each region containing multiple datacenters.
• NTT’s cloud services are offered from over 35 cloud data centers across five continents.
• OVHcloud hosts services in 30 data centres: 19 in Europe, 2 in APAC, and 9 in North America.
• Virtustream Enterprise Cloud offers application-level SLAs with up to 99.999% availability.

• “The responsibility for security and compliance in the use of cloud services is shared between the customer and the cloud service provider (CSP).”
• “The customer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but remains responsible for managing the OS and applications.”
• “Emerging use cases include AI and Machine Learning as well as the exploitation and management of IoT at scale.”
• “Loss of access to the service or data can occur for a variety of reasons some of which are technical and some due to other causes such as takeover or financial failure of the CSP.”
• “Selecting a vendor of a product or service must not be only based on the comparison provided by a KuppingerCole Leadership Compass.”
• “Innovation is not about delivering a constant flow of new releases.”
• “Rather, innovative companies take a customer-oriented upgrade approach, delivering customer-requested cutting-edge features, while maintaining compatibility with previous versions.”
• “The hyperscale cloud service providers are coming to dominate the global market.”
• “However, the original promise that using these services would reduce the cost and complexity of IT management is not generally being realised for enterprises.”
• “This has led to the growth of managed services to help enterprises get the best from the cloud services that they use.”