cloud computing

Moving to the cloud requires investments. These will grow significantly in the coming years. Source: Shutterstock

Spending on IT infrastructure for cloud set to grow 10.9pc in 2018

MOVING to the cloud requires a bit of investment, especially for enterprises looking to build that infrastructure.

According to a new forecast from IDC, total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches) for deployment in cloud environments is expected to total US$52.3 billion this year with a year-on-year growth of 10.9 percent.

Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Enterprise Storage said:

Growing expansion of digital transformation initiatives enables further adoption of cloud-based solutions around the globe.

This will result in a continuous shift in the profile of IT infrastructure buyers. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings address a broad range of business and IT needs of enterprises from ‘lift-and-shift’ to emerging workloads.

As a result, service providers’ demand for IT Infrastructure for delivering these offerings is growing steadily making them as a group a major buyer of compute, storage, and networking products

How exactly are people spending on cloud infrastructure?

Public cloud data centers will account for a majority of this spending, 65.9 percent, growing at the fastest annual rate of 11.3 percent.

Off-premises private cloud environments will represent 13.0 percent of cloud IT infrastructure spending, growing at 12.0 percent year on year.

On-premises private clouds will account for 61.7 percent of spending on private cloud IT infrastructure and will grow 9.1 percent year on year.

Worldwide spending on traditional, non-cloud, IT infrastructure is expected to decline by 2.0 percent according to IDC, however, it will account for the majority, 54.7 percent, of total end-user spending on IT infrastructure products across the three product segments.

In cloud IT environments, spending in all technology segments, except for storage platforms, is forecast to grow at double digit rates this year.

Ethernet switches and compute platforms will be the fastest growing at 20.9 percent and 12.4 percent respectively, while spending on storage platforms will grow 6.0 percent.

Investments in all three technologies will increase across all cloud deployment models – public cloud, private cloud off-premises, and private cloud on-premises.

In the long-term, IDC expects that spending on off-premises cloud IT infrastructure will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.8 percent, reaching US$55.7 billion in 2022.

Public cloud data centers will account for 83.6 percent of this amount growing at a 10.6 percent CAGR while spending on off-premises private cloud infrastructure will increase at a CAGR of 11.4 percent.

Combined with on-premises private cloud, overall spending on cloud IT infrastructure will grow at an 10.9 percent CAGR and by 2022 will surpass spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure.

Spending on on-premises private cloud IT infrastructure will grow at a 11.5 percent CAGR, while spending on non-cloud IT (on-premises and off-premises combined) will decline at a 2.7 percent CAGR during the same period.