Amazon is seriously challenged in the cloud by Microsoft

AWS was in the premier position having had a head start of more than 4 years in the cloud related business. The lowering of prices by Microsoft; a new CEO; an emphasized bet on the cloud have all contributed to Microsoft Azure's adoption by the enterprises. One of the reasons for this being the better tooling; the variety of applications and services; and not-for-Windows only shift have all contributed.

Microsoft brought in a lot of enhancements that should prove this advantage Microsoft has gained further. The storage options with SSDs and the rapid, multifaceted updates to its Azure cloud computing platform are all very attractive for enterprises.

One of the reasons that Microsoft can challenge AWS is in the attractive storage options.Azure Premium Storage Disks is in public preview since December 2014.
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/

With Azure Premium Storage Disks there are two types of durable storage, Premium and Standard.

Premium Storage  highlights

    Delivers high performance, low latency of IO intensive workloads on Azure Virtual Machines up to a total of 32TB/Virtual Machine and 50000 IOPs.

You can sign up for Azure Premium Storage at the Azure Preview Portal here:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/preview/