When an organizations decides to use the public cloud for the first time, the decision often boils down to a choice between two major players: Azure and AWS. While there are other public cloud service providers like Google, Oracle, IBM, etc., they often cater to niche specifications and industries.

When Microsoft Azure debuted as a cloud provider, AWS was already an established service provider with a loyal customer base. Microsoft Azure initially focused on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) approach to leverage the strength of Microsoft technologies used by many enterprises for software development. Azure gradually gained market acceptance, and has reached parity with or exceeded AWS in terms of service offerings, and shown strong growth of its market share.

This white paper will focus on the key features and services that make Microsoft Azure the public cloud service provider of choice for enterprise customers.