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Report: Cloud Spending Nearly a Third of All IT Infrastructure Spending

The figures come via IDC's new quarterly cloud infrastructure tracker.

• By Keith Ward
• 01/08/2015

Cloud computing is quickly moving beyond mere acceptance by organizations. Its entrenchment in datacenters has also gone mainstream, according to figures by analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

IDC reported last month that for the third quarter of 2014, nearly a third of combined IT infrastructure spending -- including hardware switches, storage and servers -- came from cloud deployments. That represented $6.5 billion, a 16 percent year over year increase.

Of that total, public cloud infrastructure was about half of that revenue. And, in fact, it's growing slightly faster -- 18 percent -- than private cloud spending.

"Public and private clouds represent the 'compute factories' and 'digital content depots' of the 3rd Platform era," IDC's Richard Villars said in the press release. "Whether internally owned or 'rented' from a service provider, cloud environments are strategic assets that organizations of all types must rely upon to quickly introduce new services of unprecedented scale, speed, and scope. Their effective use will garner first-mover advantage to any organization in a hyper-competitive market."

The IDC report was the first of its new Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, which follows IT spending specifically for the cloud market. It further breaks down the spending into public and private cloud sectors. The revenue is based on sales of three market segments: server, disk and networking technologies.