I read this article with interest, and I must say, I do agree with the points being raised on both sides of the fence.
https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-microsoft-dominance-in-uk-cloud-market-faces-competition-investigation-12977203
There are valid points from OfCom, the UK regulator, such as
highlighted worries about committed spend discounts which, Ofcom feared, could incentivise customers to use a single major firm for all or most of their cloud needs.
This is a very good point. Customers are often tempted in with monthly discounts - but those only apply if you have a committed monthly spend, which if you are trying to reduce spend on technology, is hard to achieve or even offset.
On the flip side of the coin, AWS claims
Only a small percentage of IT spend is in the cloud, and customers can meet their IT needs from any combination of on-premises hardware and software, managed or co-location services, and cloud services.
This isn’t true at all. Most startups and existing technology firms want to reduce their overall reliance on on-premises infrastructure as a means of reducing cost, negating the need to refresh hardware every x years, and further extending the capabilities of their disaster recovery and business continuity programs. The less reliance you have on a physical office, the better as this effectively lowers your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in the event that you incur physical damage owing to fire or water (for example, but not limited to) and have to replace servers and other existing infrastructure before you are effectively able to start the recovery process.
Similarly, businesses who adopt the on-premise model would typically require some sort of standby or recovery site that has both replication enabled between these sites, plus regular and structured testing. It’s relatively simple to “fail over” to a recovery site, but much harder to move back to the primary site afterwards without further downtime. For this reason, several institutions have adopted the cloud model as a way of resolving this particular issue, as well as the cost benefits.
The cost of data egress is well known throughout the industry and is an accepted (although not necessarily desirable) “standard” these days. The comment from AWS concerning the ability to switch between providers very much depends on individual technology requirements, and such a “switch” could be made much harder by leveraging the use of proprietary products such as AWS Aurora - slated as a MySQL and PostgreSQL and then attempting to switch back to native platforms - only to find some essential functionality is missing.
My personal view is that AWS are digging their heels in and disagree with the CMA because they want to retain their dominance.
Interestingly, GCS (Google Cloud Services) doesn’t seem to be in scope, and given Google’s dominance over literally everything internet related, this surprises me.
