IDC says global demand for public cloud services grew 26% in 2019 with revenues totalling US$233.4 billion. It noted a consolidation in 2019 that saw the top 5 public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing more than one third of the global total, growing 35% year-over-year.
"Cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored searches. It underpins all the digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.
What's trending today
While it took 10 years of talking about the cloud, enterprises are taking only five years to make the actual jump. Since 2016, public cloud has doubled while IaaS and PaaS nearly tripled.
This highlights the increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure and platforms for application deployment for enterprise IT internal applications as well as SaaS and digital application delivery.
Drivers of change
Deepak Mohan, research director, Cloud Infrastructure Services, commented that today's economic uncertainty draws fresh attention to the core benefits of IaaS – low financial commitment, flexibility to support business agility, and operational resilience
"Cost optimization and business resilience have emerged as top drivers of IT investment decisions and IaaS offerings are designed to enable both. The COVID-19 disruption has accelerated cloud adoption with both traditional enterprise IT organizations and digital service providers increasing use of IaaS for their technology platforms," he added.
Another IDC analyst, Larry Carvalho, research director, Platform as a Service, said digitizing processes is being prioritized by enterprises in every industry segment and that is accelerating the demand for new applications as well as repurposing existing applications.
"Modern application platforms powered by containers and the serverless approach are providing the necessary tools for developers in meeting these needs. The growth in PaaS revenue reflects the need by enterprises for tools to accelerate and automate the development lifecycle," he concluded.
For his part, Frank Della Rosa, research director, SaaS and Cloud Software with IDC said SaaS applications remains the largest segment of public cloud spending with revenues of more than $122 billion in 2019.
While growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, the current crisis serves as an accelerator for SaaS adoption across primary and functional markets to address the exponential growth of remote workers.
