'Pandemic removed any reluctance to move to cloud' - Gartner on public cloud growth

Gartner analysis indicates pandemic has generated more interest in cloud services

Worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow by a further 23.1 per cent in 2021, according to new research.

Forecasts from Gartner predict that end-user spending on cloud services will increase to a total of $332.3bn this year, up from $270bn in 2020.

"The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud," said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

"Emerging technologies such as containerisation, virtualisation and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving additional cloud spending. Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs' interest in the cloud.

"Even absent the pandemic there would still be a loss of appetite for data centres."

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to reach $122.6bn in 2021.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and desktop as a service (DaaS) will see the highest growth in 2021 at 38.5 per cent and 67.7 per cent respectively.

The analysis from Gartner indicates that cloud services will play a vital role in the global effort to produce and distribute COVID-19 vaccinations by assisting with automation and the supply chain.

Spending is expected to grow even further in 2022, with Gartner predicting that it will rise to a total of $397.4bn for the entire market.

Nag added: "It's important to note that the usage and adoption of cloud that served enterprises well during the ongoing crisis will not look the same in the coming years.

"It will further evolve from serving pedestrian use cases such as infrastructure and application migration, to those that combine cloud with technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, 5G and more."