Cloud Spending Driven by Emerging Technologies Becoming Mainstream
Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc.
“The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “Even absent the pandemic there would still be a loss of appetite for data centers.
“Emerging technologies such as containerization, virtualization and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving additional cloud spending. Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud.”
Despite macroeconomic headwinds, offerings that support or deliver public cloud services are experiencing tremendous growth. Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to reach $122.6 billion in 2021 as the demand for composable applications requires a different type of SaaS experience (see Table 1). Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) will see the highest growth in 2021, 38.5% and 67.7% respectively, as CIOs face continued pressures to scale infrastructure that supports moving complex workloads to the cloud and the demands of a hybrid workforce.
Source: Gartner 2021