IDC forecast predicts IaaS and PaaS markets will hit $400bn of sales in four years time

The analyst believes cloud IaaS and PaaS are ‘critical’ components for the future of digital infrastructure

The combined global Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) markets will reach revenues of $400bn (€339.4bn) in 2025, according to the latest forecast from IDC.

In addition, the analyst claims the combined markets will have a CAGR of 28.8 per cent during the 2021-2025 forecast period.

"Enterprise spending on public cloud infrastructure continues to grow faster than traditional IT infrastructure segments," said Cloud Infrastructure Services research manager, Andrew Smith.

"We expect all workload segments to grow in the double digits — some slightly faster than others — as enterprises emerge from 2020 and continue to prioritise workload migration and modernisation using public cloud infrastructure."

IDC highlighted application development and testing, structured data management, and structured data analytics as the largest workload segments by revenue share.

It added unstructured data analytics/data management and media streaming are forecast to be the fastest growing segments with CAGRs of 41.9 per cent and 41.2 per cent, respectively.

The research firm said other business applications, file and print, and content applications will grow slower than the overall market average while still delivering double-digit growth throughout the forecast period.

Key driver

IDC attributed the staggering revenues figure to cloud IaaS and PaaS being critical, enabling components for the future of digital infrastructure.

It claims the future of digital infrastructure is "highly dependent" on the ability of complex, connected cloud infrastructure to self-regulate and dynamically optimise itself in response to real-time changes in resource demand, application performance, and end-user experience.

By 2022, the analyst anticipates almost half of an enterprise's products and services will be digital or digitally delivered, increasing the business' reliance on infrastructure (compute, storage, networking) to support more than traditional business applications.