Cloud infrastructure spend hit $18.6bn in Q3, IDC claims

The analyst’s figures show pandemic spending was boosted by a spike in investments in cloud services and infrastructure to enable businesses to adapt to hybrid working

Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud infrastructure, including dedicated and shared environments, rose 6.6 per cent in the third quarter of 2021 to $18.6bn.

The data from IDC shows the market is continuing to have a bumper year through consecutive pandemic quarters.

The outlier was Q2 2021, when spending dipped 1.9 per cent.

Despite that, the cloud infrastructure market logged seven quarters of growth, beginning in Q3 2019.

The biggest jump was a 38.4 per cent jump in Q2 2020, as the pandemic drove businesses to adopt remote working and cloud-based technologies.

Investments in non-cloud infrastructure increased 7.3 per cent year on year in Q3 2021 to $14.6bn, the third consecutive quarter to see an increase after a period of declining spending that started in Q2 2019.

Shared cloud

IDC figures found that spending on shared cloud infrastructure reached $13bn, an uptick of 8.6 per cent compared to Q3 2020, and a 6.6 per cent increase from the previous quarter.

This continues a trend of year on year growth since Q4 2019, interrupted in the previous quarter (Q2 2021) by comparison to an exceptionally strong Q2 2020 that saw spending surge 55.1 per cent driven by the spike in demand for public cloud services in the first months of the pandemic.

The analyst said it expects to see continuously strong demand for shared cloud infrastructure with spending surpassing non-cloud infrastructure spending in 2022.

Dedicated cloud infrastructure

Spending in this segment rose 13.4 per cent in Q3 2021 to $5.6bn, the highest year on year increase since Q1 2019 with 45.5 per cent of this amount deployed on customer premises, according to IDC.

It expects that spending on cloud environments will continue to outpace non-cloud spending throughout its forecast.

FY2021

For the full year 2021, IDC predicts cloud infrastructure spending to grow 8.3 per cent compared to 2020 to $71.8bn, while non-cloud infrastructure will be up 1.9 per cent to $58.4bn after two years of declines.

Shared cloud infrastructure is expected to increase by 7.2 per cent to $49.7bn for the full year.

Spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure is expected to reach $22.2bn for the full year.