Recent evidence suggests that cloud competition in Australia is about to intensify. Australia’s high-tech population and its concern about cloud-hosting outside of the country should prove very tempting for cloud companies to set up domestically.

Technology research firm, Gartner believes that the cloud market spending will reach $2.4 billion this year, which is an increase of about 20% from last year. It is predicted that there will then be continual increases of around 16% per year until 1016.

Amazon Web Services has just set up in Sydney, with two ‘availability zones’ and Rackspace is launching its cloud data centre in Sydney, also. This should open up a number of cloud services to the Australian consumer.

Gartner says that they have “seen a lot of interest in cloud services, both public cloud and private cloud services, in Australia…so even when Amazon did not have a direct presence in …