Cloud adoption trends and the growth of Microsoft 365

Introduction

The massive success of Microsoft 365 productivity suite speaks a volume about Satya Nadella’s visionary leadership that focuses primarily on empowering organizations by providing them cloud services. Proudly, Microsoft has set a benchmark for all other cloud providers surpassing them by user count. The whole idea of remodeling the technology landscape in favor of handheld devices and thus make it flexible to derive more productivity appealed to corporates to adopt Microsoft Office 365 worldwide.

In this blog, we will look at some stats to gain insights on Microsoft’s performance against its competitors in last couple of years. Let’s start:

The key findings

• At present, the world’s top 3 cloud providers are AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
• 1 out of 5 corporate employees use a Microsoft 365 cloud service.
• Microsoft Office 365 has currently about 200 million monthly active users where Teams alone has around 115 million daily active users, the usage jumping to 50% this year.
• Google’s G Suite was early to lead the cloud productivity market but reached only 33% in 2019, up from 25% in 2018 whereas Microsoft Office 365 adoption rate soared with 79%.
• Deployment of AWS increased by 43% since 2018, reaching an average of 20% in 2019.
• After generating the revenue of US$14.3 billion by the end of June 2020, Microsoft became the largest enterprise cloud vendor of the world, followed by Amazon AWS, IBM and Google subsequently.
• At 82%, companies offering financial services are the fourth largest adopters of Microsoft Office 365.
• Most cloud services are HIPAA compliant and ensure an airtight security to patient’s personal information and other medical and financial records that belong to healthcare sector. About 79% of healthcare organizations were reported to adopt Microsoft Office 365 till last year.
• The modern enterprise app Dynamics 365 nears $2 billion in annual revenue. More than 4,500 organizations now use Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 app including commerce, finance, and supply chain management, making it one of the fastest-growing SaaS solutions in its category.
• When Microsoft unleashed AI as mainstream technology in business, Azure Cognitive Services reached new heights this year. In June alone, a whopping 13.5 billion transactions were recorded, 2.5 billion messages were sent, 9 million hours of speech was transcribed using Azure AI by companies gearing for innovation.

Did you know that both G Suite and Microsoft 365 are available for free (14 days for G Suite and 1 month for Microsoft 365)? Give it a try and compare different applications before heading for a purchase!

A closer look to key industries

The rate of cloud adoption has skyrocketed in past few years. Organizations from all sectors and industries are relying more and more on platforms like Microsoft Office 365, AWS, and G Suite. Today, Microsoft is entrusted by all industries, especially, that deal with sensitive data and process transaction frequently. Currently, financial services industry is rapidly adopting Microsoft 365 and is heavily using Office apps such as Excel. Similarly, the manufacturing industry after migrating to Microsoft 365 showed an enormous adoption of OneDrive app for cloud storage at a rate of over 26% of its users.

Also, Microsoft assisted thousands of government organizations to move to the cloud, provided an unparalleled transparency and delivered solutions to tough challenges regarding security, compliance, and risks. Further, nearly 81% of educators adopted Microsoft Office 365 globally. In Asia alone, Microsoft Teams played a monumental role in transforming education for over 150 million students and instructional staff via remote learning this year during pandemic.

How Microsoft gained ground

According to cloud adoption statistics, about 81% of the total organizations in the world deployed cloud services in 2018, out of which more than half were Microsoft Office 365 adopters. At present, over a million companies use Microsoft 365 worldwide, with over 650,000 companies using this suite in the United States alone.

Alongside, there are now 500,000 businesses using Microsoft Teams, including 91% of the Fortune 100 (2019). Also, as Outlook became mobile-friendly, it got a breakthrough response from users. Today, there are more than 100 million users running Outlook app on their iOS and Android devices. Similarly, Microsoft Office crossed 1 billion downloads.

By far and officially, Microsoft Office 365 is the most successful product of Microsoft to outstrip other cloud-based productivity applications. So, it doesn’t go without asking – what is the reason behind exponential growth of Microsoft 365?

Well, there is one thing that Microsoft has been doing more rigorously than its cloud rivalries and that is, they have been providing incentives for utilizing their services. Also, Microsoft analyzed that multitude of companies are seeking solutions to challenges they often face with apps stored on-premise. Hence, they have been constantly visiting such companies and convincing them with cost saving and other irrefutable reasons to move to the cloud and enhance overall organizational efficiency.

Next, Microsoft is smartly visiting its participants who previously used old email software such as Microsoft Exchange and enabling them to shift to modern version, thereby, turning them to new market participants.

Microsoft for greater purposes

With cloud adoption, businesses are now experiencing a true digital collaboration that drives greater agility, productivity, and security. And Microsoft 365 is seen as a logical and workable pathway for it by many enterprises. After recent developments such as Power BI, Azure AI and so on, Microsoft is on an exciting venture to serve its users with game-changing innovations in coming years.

With given cloud statistics, it looks like Microsoft has reimagined the future and already started to shape it by using powerful technology to simulate and automate everything in a contactless world.

Further, Microsoft has big dreams to revitalize industries with the concept of tech intensity in the next decade. Predictably, with the technologies like Azure API for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) FHIR Connector for Azure, Microsoft will represent a hypergrowth era with jaw-dropping collaborative experiences. Pretty clearly, Microsoft is all set to win the next stage of the cloud war.