Worldwide public cloud spending to grow 23% in 2021: Gartner

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1 per cent in 2021 to total $332.3bn, up from $270bn in 2020, according to the latest forecast from Gartner.

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to reach $122.6bn in 2021 as the demand for composable applications requires a different type of SaaS experience (see Table below).

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) will see the highest growth in 2021, 38.5 per cent and 67.7 per cent respectively, as CIOs face continued pressures to scale infrastructure that supports moving complex workloads to the cloud and the demands of a hybrid workforce.

As organisations mobilise for a massive global effort to produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccinations, SaaS-based applications that enable essential tasks such as automation and supply chain is critical. Such applications continue to demonstrate reliability in scaling vaccine management, which in turn will help CIOs further validate the ongoing shift to cloud.

Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner said the events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission-critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud. “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, IoT, 5G and more,” he added.

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