Opening the door for competitors
IBM has traditionally been a niche player in the cloud market, holding a 2% global market share compared to AWS (30%), Microsoft Azure (21%), and Google Cloud (11%). IBM Cloud targets a specific enterprise audience with hybrid cloud integration and enterprise-grade features.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have consistently demonstrated their reliability, operational efficiency, and capacity to scale. Since the control plane is crucial for managing cloud infrastructure, the Big Three hyperscalers have diversified their architectures to avoid single points of failure. Enterprises having issues with IBM Cloud might now consider switching critical data and applications to one of these larger providers that also offer advanced tools for AI, machine learning, and automation.
These outages couldn’t come at a worse time for IBM. With healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and other industries increasingly depending on AI-driven technologies, companies are focused on cloud reliability. AI workloads require real-time data processing, continuity, and reliable scaling to work effectively. For most organizations, disruptions caused by control-plane failures could lead to catastrophic AI system failures.