Microsoft continues to hold the technological lead in public clouds (Cloud Storage), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and software as a service (ApplicationPaaS).Like last year, Gartner analysts recognized the corporation as a leader in the Magic Quadrants rating in this business sector.

The victory was brought by the Microsoft Azure cloud, the only one among its peers, which provides users with a comprehensive set of options, including local backup, zone backup, global storage,and global storage with the ability to read.

Leadership in the Gartner Magic Quadrants is determined by two criteria: the ability to complete tasks and the completeness of the strategy. Using its own methodology, Gartner analyzes the performance of companies participating in the study and places them in one of four quadrants: leaders (large companies, fairly long time in the market), challengers (also big businesses that have minimal plans for the future in the industry), dreamers (small companies), niche players (usually newcomers to this rating).

This year the Microsoft Azure cloud also scored highest in the Magic Quadrants due to the completeness of its strategy and execution capabilities. The conclusions of Gartner analysts are confirmed by experts from the research company Nasuni. Their testing showed that Azure Storage performs better when processing test tasks.

According to IDC analysts, by 2020 the total volume of digital information will be about 40 Zettabytes (40 million petabytes), and most of it will be stored in the clouds.
 

The Gartner Magic Quadrants

(To see the whole interface please click on the image)

Azure Storage is well prepared for this development and offers the tools to scale its services. At the same time, the Microsoft cloud also provides reliability and continuity. This is achieved by Storage's extensive network of data centers, which will soon be available in 22 regionsso that consumers will be able to choose close ones for greater performance.

Microsoft Azure is also the only cloud provider that provides options for accessing Local Redundant Storage (LRS), Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS), Geo Redundant Storage (GRS), and read-only global storageAccess Geo Redundant Storage (RA-GRS).

The Microsoft cloud offers a wide range of storage solutions. These include Block Blobs, Page Blobs, Disks, Tables, Queues, and Files.

Another benefit of Azure Cloud Storage is its good integration with other Microsoft products, including StorSimple, Azure Backup, and Azure Site Recovery. With these tools, it is easier for companies to scale their infrastructure and recover data even after an emergency in the main data center.

Microsoft continues to improve Azure Storage and, at the request of consumers, adds additional features to this service. For example, Azure Premium Storage allows users to perform tasks with more requests and provides low latency. These tasks include SQL Server running on an Azure VM. The launch of Premium Storage has resulted in significant cost savings that thousands of companies have already taken advantage of.

According to Microsoft Daily (microsoftblog.com.ua)