Research

Report: Cloud Infrastructure To Grow 21 Percent in 2015

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 04/22/15

Total IT cloud infrastructure spending is poised to grow 21 percent over the course of 2015 to reach $32 billion in the United States, or about a third of all IT infrastructure spending, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. (IDC).

Much of that growth will occur in the public cloud, which will crank up 25 percent as compared to 2014 to reach $21 billion for the year, as opposed to the private cloud's more modest but still strong 16 percent growth on the way to $12 billion in cloud infrastructure spending.

That's a reversal from the previous year, when private cloud infrastructure spending led the way at 18.7 percent and public cloud spending growth tailed slightly as it grew 17.5 percent.

The 21 percent spending growth in the United States is forecast to trail growth in Western Europe, at 32 percent, Latin America's 23 percent growth and Japan, at 22 percent.

Looking further out, IDC predicts that cloud IT infrastructure will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14 percent, with both public and private cloud spending experiencing the same CAGR, to crack $52 billion, or 45 percent of total IT infrastructure spending, by the forecast period's end. The public cloud will account for $32 billion of total cloud IT infrastructure spending and private cloud spending will make up the $20 billion difference, according to the company.

"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," said Kuba Stolarski, research manager of Server, Virtualization and Workload Research at IDC, in a prepared statement. "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."