Cloud Computing is continuing to grow with the market growing by 24 per cent annually, and demand for SaaS, PaaS and IaaS remaining strong. Globally, the combined vendor revenues are around $180bn, while new research from communications providers CenturyLink and Statista forecast it could be worth $411bn by 2020
Cloud services are increasingly adopted to improve productivity, and with business that do so growing 19.6 per cent faster than their competitors the figures seem to back up the claims of many suppliers.
More than half (57%) of European enterprises rate cloud services as “very important”, however low adoption rates in France and Germany of 11 to 12 per cent show that there is strong potential for growth in these markets. By 2020 cloud services in Germany are expected to be worth $20.4bn
Public cloud services are also growing in popularity as the convenience of being always connected remains attractive. Figures released by Synergy Research Group indicate that Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the global market with a share of 33%, well ahead of Microsoft Azure (13%) and Google Cloud Platform (6%).
Like the corporate market, the public market is highly regional with some areas having higher adoption rates than others, allowing healthy rivalry to exist between providers such as Alibaba, IBM, Salesforce and Tencent. According to Synergy Research Group’s Q1 2018 estimates the breakdown is as follows:
Watch out for Chinese provider Alibaba, which is indicating it may move into the rest of the world. IBM is another interesting case. With a strong background in hosting private cloud services its market share has been relatively stable at around 8 percent. It is not clear, however, if it is losing or gaining market share in the public sphere, against big hitters like Google and Microsoft.
Reasons for adoption and future growth
The biggest reasons to move to the cloud cited by IT managers are availability and resiliency, followed by agility, responsiveness and faster feature updates. Of enterprises using cloud technology 85% are using multiple providers.
However, concerns about performance and scalability are rated by 80% of managers as being a significant barrier to adoption, while 70% worry about keeping sensitive data secure online. These worries, combined with the 33% of IT professionals that are unsure about cloud migration means many enterprises are delaying migration, although they will likely be forced to do so in the next few years to remain competitive.