Cloud infrastructure services spend hit yet another record in Q1 2020, growing 34% to US$31.0 billion. Growth in cloud services was driven by organizations around the world moving to remote working as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As a result, enterprises sought rapid access to compute resources in the face of lockdowns and disruption. A surge in demand for online collaboration tools, ecommerce and consumer cloud services drove sharp increases in cloud infrastructure consumption, benefiting all the major cloud providers. But this was offset by a slowdown in large complex enterprise migrations and transformational cloud projects as businesses called a halt to all but the most important IT tasks as lockdowns took effect. Demand from digital companies that were impacted by the lockdowns in sectors such as hospitality and travel was also impacted.

AWS maintained its leading position in cloud services, accounting for 32% of the total market in Q1 as sales grew 33%. In dollar terms, AWS outpaced its key competitors once again. Microsoft’s Azure sales increased 59%, taking its share to 17%. Capacity limits were reached for Azure in certain markets, though this was due to unprecedented use of Teams, which did not have a direct impact on Azure revenue. This also forced Microsoft to restrict consumption for some services and new customers. Google Cloud held onto third place in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market in Q1 2020, followed closely by Alibaba Cloud. Both had a 6% share of the total cloud infrastructure services market. Google Cloud saw healthy adoption of its data and analytics platform in some of its key verticals, led by the public sector, healthcare, service providers and financial services, though this was partially offset by weakness in other segments. Google Cloud continues to invest in an aggressive hiring strategy for Google Cloud Platform, across both enterprise sales and technical resources. Alibaba Cloud was one of the first cloud service providers to launch initiatives to support businesses affected by the lockdown in China, with free credits and access to its DingTalk collaboration suite.