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Public Cloud Spending To Grab One-Third of All IT Dollars in 2015

Within four years, predicts IDC, that number will increase to nearly half of all infrastructure spending.

• By Keith Ward
• 07/07/2015

Spending on cloud infrastructure will consume a greater percentage of IT budgets going forward, and this year will account for one-third of all dollars spent, according to analyst firm IDC.

Its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker predicts that cloud infrastructure products -- which it defines as "server, storage and Ethernet switch" -- will grow by 26 percent this year, to about $33 billion. In 2014, cloud infrastructure spending was 28 percent of overall IT infrastructure spending, demonstrating the increasing velocity of the cloud.

It's just the beginning, too, according to IDC's projections. By 2019, the company expects cloud infrastructure products to account for nearly half -- 46.5 percent -- of all IT infrastructure spending. The increase will come at the expense of non-cloud IT infrastructure, which IDC predicts will fall at a rate of 1.4 percent annually.

The breakdown between public and private cloud spending is indicative of the direction in which IDC sees enterprises moving. Public cloud spending will grow 32.2 percent year-over-year in 2015 to $21.7 billion, while private cloud will see a 16.8 percent year-over-year increase, to $11.7 billion. Because most businesses are still putting their focus on private clouds, this represents a significant shift in priorities.

 Natalya Yezhkova, a research director for Storage Systems at IDC, explained the results this way: "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 services providers will continue to fuel growth in spending on the underlying IT infrastructure in the foreseeable future."