More companies are moving parts or their entire IT infrastructure to the Cloud. Improved resistance to downtime, mobility on virtually any device, and the cost advantages are among some of the more popular reasons small to medium businesses have chosen a virtual private cloud to host their business information systems.

Each vendor has its own strengths and weaknesses, and none is dramatically better than others, but an associated operational cost and varying use-cases can help IT find the right solution.

Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS are two of the top choices when it comes to infrastructure as a service. This article outlines which one to choose for your business; here’s how the two cloud platforms compare, complete with a side-by-side feature and services comparison.

The Basics

In broad strokes, both Amazon and Microsoft organize AWS and Azure respective features into similar groups. AWS four core feature consist of Compute, Storage & Content Delivery, Databases, and Networking—all operating under Amazon’s extensive admin controls, which include identity management, auditing, encryption key creation/control/storage, monitoring and logging, and more.

Azure essentially covers these bases, too, lumping them into four general categories or functions: build infrastructure, develop modern applications, gain insights from data, and manage identity and access. Azure has its own Hadoop implementation, HDInsight, and Apache storm can do real-time processing. You can get virtual machines off the ground quickly and give your developers what they need to build and deploy apps.

The Right Choice for Microsoft Customers

Azure is designed to work hand in hand with other Microsoft products, there are many enterprises, Medium businesses that butter the company’s bread whether it’s Windows server, Exchange, Office of simply Windows workstations businesses make up a significant portion of Microsoft revenue.

Azure Active Directory is one example of this strategy in action. In addition to serving as a single sign-on option for all sorts of application like Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and plenty of third-party applications (including Citrix, Salesforce, Box, etc.) Azure Active Directory can integrate with an enterprise’s on-premises active directory to extend an enterprise’s local directories to the cloud.

Considering the possible savings with regard to training and deployment if your business is already committed to Microsoft.

The Right Choice for AWS Customers

When AWS was launched, it was primarily used by a smaller faction of developers as a cheap way to test things or run a simple website. But a lot of those customers, including Netflix, Airbnb, and more recently, Slack, went from running small experimental apps in AWS into making it the core of their booming businesses.

Operational costs include transaction and management costs, and are far more likely to show the contrast between vendors than capacity cost. Amazon Glacier is by far the cheapest storage option at one terabyte of monthly storage for $10, for example, but downloading a single terabyte from service costs $120.

Amazon is a likely pick when a business only wants storage.

Since no single vendor is head and shoulder above the rest, selection should take into account the other potential cloud service that could be married with storage to simplify the process. The below comparison chart will help the small, medium businesses to choose the right vendor for their businesses.