For UK mid-market organisations (100-2,000 employees), the cloud decision is almost always AWS or Azure (or both — multi-cloud is the norm at this size). Google Cloud sits behind both in UK enterprise share. The right answer is less about feature parity than about your existing Microsoft posture, your team's skills, and your industry.
The short answer
Microsoft-shop (M365 E3/E5 + Entra ID + Intune across your estate): Azure as primary, AWS for specific workloads where AWS is meaningfully better.
Cloud-native / SaaS-first / start-up scale-up: AWS as primary. Broadest service catalogue + most mature managed services + biggest UK skills pool.
Public sector / NHS / regulated FS: depends on the framework (CCS G-Cloud lists both). Compliance posture matters more than service catalogue.
Where AWS wins
Service breadth + maturity. Deepest catalogue + longest production track record. For organisations building novel architecture, AWS's service count is genuine value.
UK skills market. AWS-certified engineers are still ~2× the UK contractor market vs Azure. Easier to hire, easier to outsource.
Spot + savings instance economics. AWS Spot pricing for non-critical batch can be 70-90% below on-demand.
Where Azure wins
Microsoft tenant consolidation. Identity (Entra ID) + email (Exchange Online) + endpoint (Intune) + security (Defender XDR) + compute / storage / network in one tenant. Single billing, audit, security posture.
Azure Hybrid Benefit. Windows Server + SQL Server licences come with up to 40% discount on Azure VMs vs equivalent AWS EC2. Material for Windows-heavy estates.
Public sector alignment. Azure UK has wider footprint in UK gov + specific NHS patterns. Many CCS customers default to Azure.
The honest multi-cloud reality
Most UK mid-market customers end up multi-cloud whether they planned to or not. Typical pattern: Azure for M365-adjacent + productivity; AWS for analytics / ML / cloud-native; both for DR.
Multi-cloud is operationally more expensive — two consoles, two skill sets, two billing. The benefit is vendor diversification + workload-specific optimisation.
Pick a primary (90% of workload); use a secondary for specific value-driven cases.
What Servnet does
Servnet partners with AWS + Azure for UK cloud advisory + migration + landing-zone deployment. Typical engagement: 1) workload audit + cloud-fit analysis, 2) landing-zone design (network, identity, security, observability), 3) phased workload migration with parallel-run, 4) optimization + cost-control.
See our Cloud vs On-Prem TCO analysis if you're still evaluating cloud vs keeping on-prem.