Cloud infrastructure spend surges to hit $70bn in 2021

Spending totalled more than $70bn last year, new figures show

Cloud infrastructure spending has surpassed $70bn as more money was splashed out in 2021.

IDC used its Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment to analyse expenditure over the last year.

It found that in 2021, cloud infrastructure investment totalled $73.9bn - up 8.8 per cent over 2020 - as more money was spent in dedicated and shared environments.

Dedicated cloud services are shared within single or extended enterprises with restrictions on access while shared cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers.

Expenditure on shared cloud infrastructure reached $14.4bn in the fourth quarter - increasing 13.9 per cent compared to a year ago - and grew to $51.4bn for 2021.

And dedicated cloud infrastructure spending increased 12.5 per cent year over year to $6.7bn and grew 11.8 per cent to $22.5bn for the full year 2021.

Figures also show that spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud infrastructure, including dedicated and shared environments, increased 13.5 per cent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2021 to $21.1bn.

Meanwhile, investments in non-cloud infrastructure increased 1.5 per cent year over year for the quarter to $17.2bn, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of growth.

In the full year, non-cloud infrastructure spending increased 4.2 per cent over 2020, reaching a total of $59.6bn.

For 2022, IDC is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending to grow 21.7 per cent compared to 2021 to $90.0bn, while non-cloud infrastructure is expected to drop 0.3 per cent to $59.4bn.