Public Cloud set for another bumper year in 2021

Australian organisations will spend a combined $10.4 billion on public cloud in 2021, according to new research from analyst firm Gartner.

That’s an increase of 18 percent from total spend in 2020 which the researcher detailed in the latest quarterly update to its forecast for public cloud services.
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The report stated that cloud software as a service is set to lead the growth in public cloud services with more than $5.7 billion in sales predicted for 2021, up from approximately $4.8 billion this year.

Australian spending on cloud platform as a service will hit $1.7 billion in 2021, up from $1.3 billion this year. Spending on infrastructure as a service is set to see a more than $250 million increase next year, to around $1.35 billion from 2020’s $1.1 billion spend.

Gartner analyst Sid Nag said the pandemic “validated cloud’s value proposition”.

“The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organisations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans,” he said.

Worldwide spend on cloud is set to hit US$304.9 billion, up from US$257.5 billion in 2020, according to Gartner, an increase of 18 percent.

The proportion of IT spending shifting to cloud was projected to make up 14.2 percent of total global enterprise IT spend in 2024, up from 9.1 percent in 2020.

Although software as a service is still the largest market segment and forecast to grow to US$117.7 billion in 2021, Gartner said platform as a service offerings were anticipated to grow by a higher margin at 26.6 percent.

The increased consumption of PaaS will be driven by the need for remote workers to have access to high performing, content-rich and scalable infrastructure to perform their duties, which largely comes in the form of modernised and cloud-native applications, Gartner said.