OThe UK cloud market is growing faster than ever, with vendor revenues swelling by 32% in 2018, passing $250 billion for the first time, according to Synergy Research’s latest figures.

The most accelerated growth happened in the IaaS and PaaS sub-sectors, with 50% growth reported apiece in just 12 months.

Hybrid cloud management software grew by 41% and enterprise SaaS and public cloud infrastructure both increased by 30%. Hosted private cloud infrastructure services weren’t far behind with 29% growth.

“In 2018 cloud started to dominate IT spending in some areas, sucking up potential growth opportunities for non-cloud technologies and services,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.

During 2018, there was a distinct increase on cloud infrastructure spend, overtaking the amount invested in hardware and software on both public and private clouds for the first time. However, total spend on hardware and software wasn’t low and this surpassed $100 billion, evenly split between public and private cloud environments.

Microsoft, Amazon/AWS, Dell EMC, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, HPE, Adobe, and VMware revenues accounted for half of all cloud-related income.

Cloud service providers, in particular, had a very good year, generating more than $150 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services and enterprise SaaS via applications covering search, social networking, email, e-commerce, gaming and mobile apps.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for both cloud service providers and technology vendors and our latest forecasts show that while market growth rates will inevitably erode due to the sheer scale of the numbers, the overall market will double in size in under four years,” Dinsdale added.