This year the global public cloud services market will grow by 16.5 per cent on last year’s total of $175 billion in sales, according to market analyst Gartner. Total sales of the various cloud services will be worth $204 billion, it forecast.

The most exciting market to be in will be infrastructure services, with its 38.5% rate of expansion making it the fastest growing cloud market. Sales of infrastructure as a service [IaaS] will create $22.4billion in revenue in 2016, according to Gartner’s forecast.

Cloud advertising is the largest segment of the global cloud services market. Though it is growing at around a third of the rate of IaaS (at 13.6%) its sales in 2016 will reach $90.3 billion. The next biggest segment is predicted to be sales of business processes (BPaaS) which will be worth $42 billion, while cloud application services (SaaS) will create $37.75 billion of revenue in 2016. Surprisingly, cloud management and security will be worth a relatively lowly figure of $6.248 billion, a figure that is possibly due to expand as the cloud industry matures.

IaaS is booming because enterprises are abandoning the idea of building their own data centres and moving their infrastructure to the public cloud, according to report author Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. However, Nag had words of warning for vendors in this area. “Certain market leaders have built a significant lead in this segment, so providers should focus on creating differentiation for success,” said Nag.

This year it will be impossible to go wrong in the public cloud as high rates of growth will be enjoyed across all markets. Gartner expects this to continue through 2017, said Nag. “This strong growth reflects a shift away from legacy IT services to cloud-based services, due to increased trend of organisations pursuing a digital business strategy,” said Nag.