Evolution of Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure, born in February 2010 (not on a leap year), is approaching it’s 10th birthday. Azure is home to over 600 of Microsoft’s services, a large contributor to Microsoft’s announcement this year of its first revenue post beyond $110bn and server infrastructure in 140 countries – not bad for a ten year old.

In fact, over 90% of the Fortune 500 run processed on the Microsoft Cloud.

Whilst AWS (Amazon Web Services) is still at the top of the public cloud market with 33% of the share, a share which has stayed the same for 3 years. Meanwhile Microsoft has been gaining ground quickly in this growing marketplace with a 3% jump to 13% at the beginning of 2018. Whilst we don’t have exist figures for 2019 the predictions are a similar or increased share to around 20%.

We have highlighted the key changes to Azure since its birth in 2010:

• October 2008 – Microsoft announced “Project Red Dog”
• 1st February 2010 – Commercially available launch date, as Windows Azure
• June 2012 – Availability for Websites and Virtual Machines for Windows and Linux
• April 2014 – Windows Azure was renamed to Microsoft Azure
• September 2017 – New Microsoft Azure logo
• February 2018 – Microsoft achieves 13% public cloud share
• April 2019 – Launch of Azure Front Door Service for fast delivery of global web applications

With the rapid growth of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 services we expect more organisations taking advantage of improving productivity by scaling cloud applications and taking a cloud-first network strategy.