Cloud Computing

Cloud IT Investments Still Rising

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/20/15

Public cloud investment is on a fast-track, private cloud spending is also up and non-cloud IT infrastructure spending is flat. That's the appraisal of International Data Corp. (IDC) in its "Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker."

The IT research firm is forecasting that the total cloud IT infrastructure outlay, which includes server, storage and Ethernet switch spending, will grow by 26 percent this year. It will reach a total of $33.4 billion and encompass a third of all IT infrastructure spending.

The public cloud portion of that will grow by 32 percent from year over year in 2015 to $21.7 billion, primarily as a result, the company reported, of public cloud service providers continuing to invest in expanding their datacenters and services. Private cloud investment will rise by 17 percent to $11.7 billion. Non-cloud IT infrastructure will stay the same, about $67 billion.

Dominance of spending on public cloud IT infrastructure will continue through 2019, IDC noted, at the rate of 16.5 percent year over year vs. 14 percent for private cloud expenditure.

"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 Research Director Natalya Yezhkova in a prepared 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."