AWS vs. Azure — A Quick Comparison

Research has shown that about 77 percent of businesses have had at least one application or their entire infrastructure in the cloud.

This trend is projected to continue given the flexibility and scalability that cloud computing offers to businesses. This is not to mention the competitive edge it offers you over other companies that may not be using cloud services.

While migrating to cloud computing is easy, most businesses find it difficult to choose between the two giant cloud service providers: Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

To make an informed decision, here’s an AWS vs. Azure comparison guide:

AWS offers temporary Elastic Block Storage that’s allocated when an instance starts and terminated when it ends. Other storage solutions include the Elastic File System, import/export of large data volume, and Storage Gateway.

Microsoft’s Azure offerings include the Azure Blob storage, Azure core storage services, and the Table and File storage. It also allows for the transfer of huge data through its Import Export site. For data backup and archiving, users can utilize Azure backup and site recovery.

Both AWS and Azure offer equally competitive computing power, but there’s a thin line of difference when it comes to the computing resources offered by each.

AWS comes with Elastic Compute instances (EC2) that offer scalable computing on-demand and customization for several options. This allows you to choose the memory capacity, power, as well as the number of Virtual Machines (VMs).

In addition, Amazon Web Services offers EC2-related services such as EC2 container, Autoscaling, AWS lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk app deployment.

Azure, on the other hand, focuses on VMs where users have to choose Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) for their virtual machine. You can specify the memory size and cores of your VHD or choose a pre-configured one from Microsoft.

Data security is one of the major concerns for businesses moving to the cloud. The two public cloud providers have tried to outsmart each other by offering sole-proprietary security solutions. This is based on role-based access control (RBAC), which manages how users have access to particular resources within the cloud.

Azure uses Active Directory version of RBAC whose capabilities exceed those of AWS’s RBAC — the Identity and Access Management (IAM). In fact, AWS directs its users on its own platform to use Azure’s Active Directory.

However, this is not to mean that AWS doesn’t offer premium security solutions as Azure does. Its sophisticated security services such as DDoS protection and Guard security also compete closely with Active Directory features.

Besides, the security of your data in the cloud is more dependant on your staff than the tools used.