IDC: Cloud to make up nearly half of IT infrastructure spending by 2019

Enterprise adoption of public cloud services seems to be outstripping private cloud demand

Enterprise adoption of public cloud services seems to be outstripping private cloud demand

Total cloud infrastructure spending will grow by 21 per cent year over year to $32bn this year, accounting for approximately 33 per cent of all IT infrastructure spending, up from about 28 per cent in 2014, according to IDC.

The research and analyst house echoed claims that cloud computing has been significantly disrupting the IT infrastructure market over the past couple of years. The firm estimates last year cloud infrastructure spending totalled $26.4bn, up 18.7 per cent from the year before.

Kuba Stolarski, research manager, server, virtualization and workload research at IDC said much of the growth over the next few years will be driven largely by public cloud adoption.

Private cloud infrastructure spending will grow by 16 per cent year on year to $12bn, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by a whopping 25 per cent in 2015 to $21bn – nearly twice as much, the firm believes.

“The pace of adoption of cloud-based platforms will not abate for quite some time, resulting in cloud IT infrastructure expansion continuing to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market for the foreseeable future,” Stolarski explained.

“As the market evolves into deploying 3rd Platform solutions and developing next-gen software, organizations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud solutions.”

By 2019, the firm believe, cloud infrastructure spending will top $52bn and represent 45 per cent of the total IT infrastructure spend; public cloud will represent about $32bn of that amount, and private cloud the remaining $20bn.

According to IDC, 15 per cent of the overall infrastructure spend in EMEA was related to cloud environments in 2014, up from 8 per cent in 2011. $3.4bn was spent on hardware going to cloud environments in EMEA in 2013, up 21 per cent from 2012.