08:58 AM EST, 01/28/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Amazon ( AMZN ) and Microsoft ( MSFT ) are under scrutiny by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority due to their dominance of cloud services, and the regulator said competition among cloud services providers "is not working as well as it could."

The watchdog said Tuesday there are "significant barriers to entry and expansion" that make it more difficult for alternative cloud suppliers to succeed. It noted that Amazon's ( AMZN ) Amazon Web Services and Microsoft ( MSFT ) are the two largest providers of cloud services in the UK, with each having a 30% to 40% market share.

Although customers enjoy several benefits by using "the public cloud over on-premise IT or private cloud," they face "a limited choice of providers," the CMA said Tuesday in a release of its provisional findings of an investigation into cloud services competition in the UK.

The CMA inquiry group called on the regulator to consider probing Amazon's ( AMZN ) AWS and Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Azure cloud service and potentially designate them as having "strategic market status" in cloud services.

Amazon ( AMZN ) and Microsoft ( MSFT ) didn't immediately reply to requests for comment from MT Newswires.