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IDC praises EMEA cloud infrastructure – but warns of potential UK downturn post-Brexit

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Analyst house IDC has released two forecasts in quick succession examining the cloud infrastructure landscape, and found that EMEA cloud IT infrastructure revenue grew 17% to $1.3 billion (£1bn) in the first quarter of this year.

IDC expects this particular market to hit more than $10bn by 2020, creating 46.4% of total market expenditure, while total cloud-based EMEA infrastructure spend on server, disk storage and Ethernet switch, grew by four percentage points compared to this time last year.

Overall, private cloud represented $0.8bn in the first quarter, with public cloud at $0.6bn and traditional IT at $4bn. Year over year private cloud growth was 20.8%, compared to public cloud at 13.4% and traditional IT at a 6.9% decrease.

IDC tracked Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp and Oracle among others for the survey, and found some interesting regional highlights. For Western Europe, growth in cloud infrastructure was distributed almost equally between enterprise storage (42%) and servers (45%), while CEMA (Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) represented 15% of overall EMEA cloud investments this quarter.

Yet this could change. While the first quarter’s figures naturally did not account for the result of a UK referendum, IDC warned that the second quarter could be an eye-opener, with the research firm expecting a ‘challenging transition’ ahead if the UK activates the process of withdrawing from the EU. “Our forecast for the UK may be adjusted downward in the following quarter,” said Kamil Gregor, IDC European infrastructure group research analyst. “Other EMEA markets are expected to remain largely unaffected.”

The result of the EU referendum has had effects on other parts of business infrastructure. Now that the UK has returned a Brexit vote, and assuming the formal process to leave the EU will be initiated, it doesn’t mean businesses should avoid data best practices in line with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to commentators.

Elsewhere, IDC predicted that spending on IT infrastructure for cloud environments in 2016 will be strong despite a first quarter slowdown. Total spending will increase by 15.5% in 2016 to reach $37.1bn.