Cloud computing isn’t yet the majority of IT infrastructure spending, but it is definitely the fastest growing portion of the overall market.
A new report from IDC Corp.’s Worldwide Quarterly Infrastructure Tracker says that total cloud IT infrastructure spending, including server, storage and Ethernet switches, will grow by 26.4 per cent in 2015 to reach US$33.4 billion, accounting for one-third of all IT infrastructure spending.
Breaking down the cloud figures further, private cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 16.8 per cent to reach US$11.7 billion, and public cloud spending will grow by 32.2 per cent to US$21.7 billion. Conversely, non-cloud IT infrastructure spending will stay relatively flat at about US$67 billion.
Over the next five years, IDC sees cloud IT infrastructure spending achieving a compound annual growth rate of 15.6 per cent and growing to US$54.6 billion by 2017, which would account for 46.5 per cent of total IT infrastructure spending. Meanwhile, non-cloud spending is expected to decline with a CAGR of -1.4 per cent. Public cloud spending is expected to have a CAGR of 16.5 per cent, with private cloud spending just behind at 14 per cent.
“End users continue to evaluate various approaches to adopting cloud-based IT: some integrate public cloud service into their IT strategies, others choose to build their own private clouds or use third-party private cloud offerings, and some, seeing benefits in both, implement hybrid cloud strategies,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research director for storage systems with IDC, in a statement. “The breadth and width of cloud offerings only continue to grow, with an increasing universe of business- and consumer-oriented solutions being born in the cloud and/or served better by the cloud. This growing demand from the end user side and expansion of cloud-based offerings from service providers will continue to fuel growth in spending on the underlying IT infrastructure in the foreseeable future.”
