News

The Cloud Now Accounts for One-Third of Total IT Infrastructure Spending

• By David Ramel
• 04/24/2015

The ubquitious cloud continues to conquer the datacenter, now accounting for one-third of all IT infrastructure spending, according to new research from IDC.

The inexorable growth of the cloud IT infrastructure market is accelerating to 21 percent year over year and will total $32 billion this year, the research firm said, noting that it measured server, disk storage and Ethernet switch metrics in its latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker.

"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 IDC's Kuba Stolarski in a 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."

The cloud's 33 percent chunk of total IT infrastructure spending is up from last year's number of 28 percent and is expected to close in on 45 percent in the next five years. In the private cloud arena, spending is expected to grow by 16 percent to $12 billion this year, while spending on public cloud IT infrastructure will grow by 25 percent to $21 billion.

Last year, the total cloud spend amounted to $26.4 billion, an increase of 18.7 percent year over year. That total spend was segmented out to just less than $10 billion in the private domain (up nearly 21 percent year over year) and $16.5 billion in public scenarios (up 17.5 percent year over year).

"For the five-year forecast period, IDC expects that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14 percent; both public cloud and private cloud are expected to grow at the same CAGR. By 2019, IDC expects cloud IT infrastructure spending to be $52 billion, or 45 percent of total IT infrastructure spend; public cloud will represent about $32 billion of that amount, and private cloud will account for the remaining $20 billion."