Gartner: Public cloud market to hit $208 billion this year
While security concerns remain, they cannot stifle cloud adoption says analyst
Public cloud services are expected to surge in growth by 17.2 percent in 2016, to create a market worth a hefty $208.6 billion, according to analyst house Gartner.
The need for IT modernisation will be the driver behind this growth, followed by the need for more technology innovation, agility and cost savings motivating organisations to adopt the public cloud.
“Growth of public cloud is supported by the fact that organisations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.
Cloudy Future
Gartner noted that the highest growth area will be cloud infrastructure services, which are forecast to grow by 42.8 percent in 2016. That segment will be followed by software-as-a-service, which is expected to grow by 21.7 percent in 2016, to hit $38.9 billion.
Despite this healthy outlook on public cloud use, Nag notes that there is still some way to go for companies to snap up cloud services rather than just aspire to use them.
“However, the aspiration for using cloud services out-paces actual adoption. There’s no question there is great appetite within organisations to use cloud services, but there are still challenges for organisations as they make the move to the cloud. Even with the high rate of predicted growth, a large number of organisations still have no current plans to use cloud services,” he said.
As usual, one of the main barriers to cloud adoption revolves around cyber security and privacy, despite the strong track record many public cloud suppliers have on protecting data.
“Gartner’s position on cloud security has been clear — public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure. The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner.
“More education is needed to help organisations overcome the hype associated with security concerns. This should be a key area of focus for providers in working with their clients to unlock the benefits of public cloud services.”
Gartner noted that most organisations are already using a combination of cloud services from multiple providers, and that is only set to increase, with Gartner predicting more organisations with hybrid cloud infrastructure and systems.
With companies like Microsoft building new data centres in specific regions to increase the spread of their public clouds, the services and public cloud platforms on offer look set to only increase, until complete cloud use in enterprises becomes the norm.