Microsoft in 2017 gained significant ground on Amazon Web Services in the market for cloud services like servers and storage, according to new market share figures from Gartner featured in this report from The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft’s share of the cloud infrastructure market grew from 8.7% to 13.3% from 2016 to 2017, while Amazon’s market share dropped from 53.7% to 51.8% during the period, according to Gartner. 

AWS executives probably won’t be losing sleep over these numbers. But the market share gain does support Microsoft’s oft-stated position that large companies prefer to run some computing in their own data centers in conjunction with Azure cloud services, which is called “hybrid” cloud.  It also suggests that retailers’ exodus from AWS could be playing right into Microsoft’s hands.