In the fourth quarter of 2024, the most popular vendor in the cloud infrastructure services market, Amazon Web Services (AWS), controlled 33 percent of the entire market. Microsoft Azure takes second place with 20 percent market share, followed by Google Cloud with 10 percent market share. Together, these three cloud vendors account for 63 percent of total spend in the fourth quarter of 2024. Organizations use cloud services from these vendors for machine learning, data analytics, cloud native development, application migration, and other services. AWS Services Amazon Web Services is used by many organizations because it offers a wide variety of services and products to its customers that improve business agility while being secure and reliable. One of AWS’s most used services is Amazon EC2, which lets customers create virtual machines for their strategic projects while spending less time on maintaining servers. Another important service is Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which offers a secure file storage service. In addition, Amazon also offers security, website infrastructure management, and identity and access management solutions. Cloud infrastructure services Vendors offering cloud services to a global customer base do so through different types of cloud computing, which include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Further, there are different cloud computing deployment models available for customers, namely private cloud and public cloud, as well as community cloud and hybrid cloud. A cloud deployment model is defined based on the location where the deployment resides, and who has access to and control over the infrastructure.

In 2025, the software as a service (SaaS) market was worth approximately 250 billion U.S. dollars and estimated to reach 299 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. SaaS applications are run in the cloud and usually accessible through desktops and mobile applications, as well as through a web interface. SaaS platforms empower businesses The overall SaaS market is expected to continue growing, as organizations of all sizes around the world adopt SaaS solutions for a variety of business functions. Among these are solutions for customer resource management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), as well as web hosting and eCommere. How does the SaaS business model work? SaaS companies offer their products to customers through the internet for a monthly subscription or a pay-as-you-go model. This may be cheaper for customers, as they do not have to invest in other on-premises software products up-front and are instead more flexible to end contracts of software products they do not need anymore. This way, SaaS companies also benefit from the recurring revenue. Importantly, they are also responsible for continuously developing the software and running it on their infrastructure. Well-known SaaS vendors include Salesforce, SAP, Zoom, and Adobe.

In its 2024 financial year, Microsoft generated 77 billion U.S. dollars from its productivity and business processes segment and a further 105 billion through its intelligent cloud segment. Thanks in part to the rapid growth in these two areas, 2024 proved to be the company’s most successful year ever in terms of annual revenue, with the total figure reaching over 245 billion dollars. Microsoft Corporation Since its foundation in 1975, Microsoft has grown into one of the most successful tech firms in the world and has experienced years of continued success. In order to ensure that this growth persists, the company has added tens of thousands of employees over the past decade and invested billions into research and development. Some of Microsoft’s major business ventures include its Windows operating system, various lines of consumer electronics, software packages such as Microsoft Office, as well as newer offerings such as cloud computing capabilities. Intelligent cloud segment As Microsoft's fastest-growing business, intelligent cloud replaced the more personal computing segment in FY2020 to become the company's largest business segment. The intelligent cloud segment contains Microsoft's public, private, and hybrid server products and cloud services, such as Azure, SQL Server, etc. Together with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure is one of the most popular cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. The intelligent cloud segment, however, does not reflect the totality of Microsoft's cloud business, as Office 365 - the company's popular cloud collaboration solution - is grouped under the productivity and business processes segment. The software giant has established a firm footing in the fast-growing cloud market.