Spending on cloud as a proportion of overall IT expenditure is growing at healthy rates

Cloud-related IT infrastructure spending in the EMEA region grew 16 per cent year on year to reach $1.01bn in the first quarter of this year, representing just under 20 per cent of the overall IT infrastructure spend according to analyst house IDC.

Spending on IT infrastructure (servers, disk storage, and Ethernet switches) for public cloud accounts for about 8 per cent and private cloud 11 per cent of the overall spend; the firm previously estimated that growth in spending on public cloud would outpace private cloud spending by nearly 10 percentage points (25 and 16 per cent, respectively).

Michal Vesely, research analyst, european infrastructure at IDC said much of the expenditure in Western Europe was fuelled mainly by public cloud and large-scale datacentre installations.

“Private cloud expenditure, especially on premises, on the other hand, is more directly connected to regular IT investments by enterprises,” he explained. “Private cloud spending saw a slower pace as users assess their storage, as well as integrated and hyperconverged systems, strategies. Once decisions are made, we expect another major push in the forthcoming period.”

The firm also said unstable macroeconomic conditions in Southern and Western Europe haven’t adversely impacted spending trends , although on-premise deployments seem to be growing at a slower rate – in part due to an increased shift to cloud. According to the analyst house this shift is in full swing. In April the firm forecast that cloud will make up nearly half of all IT infrastructure spending in four years.