2014 was the year in which both Microsoft and Google got serious about their public cloud options and taking on Amazon Web Services directly with their own Infrastructure as a Service and associated services.

That both of these companies have extremely deep pockets is not lost on the market leader AWS which continues to roll out new, and higher-level services frequently. If you’re a cloud deployer or would-be cloud deployer, AWS Re:Invent is a must-attend event.

Long story short: [company]Google[/company] and [company]Microsoft[/company] have made huge strides, but AWS, with its 8-year head start, remains the cloud to beat. It’s a good time to be a cloud customer provided you can track the dueling product releases and price cuts and can manage to keep yourself out of the vendor lock-in that afflicted many IT shops in the past few decades.

Cybersecurity fears grow

The counterpoint to all of the above is that 2014 was…