According to Gartner, public cloud continues strong growth with global public cloud services market expected to grow by 17.3% to $206.2 billion in 2019, up from $175.8 billion last year. Leading the growth is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It is the fastest-growing segment with 27.6% growth and is expected to nearly reach $40 billion.
In the next three years Gartner anticipates that 90% of companies utilizing the public cloud will combine IaaS with platform as a service (PaaS) through a 3rd party provider. According to Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, "Demand for integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings is driving the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption. We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organizations will demand offerings with more breadth and depth for their hybrid environments.”
Even with strong growth, spending on the public cloud is just over 5% of worldwide spending for IT. Anticipated to hit $3.8 trillion this year, a 3.2% increase over 2018, cloud software is growing at 22% against just 6% growth for all other software.
Per John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, “…it is the shift from ownership to service that is sending ripples through every segment of the forecast.” Lovelock continued, “What this signals, for example, is more enterprise use of cloud services — instead of buying their own servers, they are turning to the cloud. As enterprises continue their digital transformation efforts, shifting to ‘pay for use’ will continue. This sets enterprises up to deal with the sustained and rapid change that underscores digital business.”
The report also noted that, “IT services will be a key driver for IT spending in 2019 as the market is forecast to reach $1 trillion in 2019, an increase of 4.7 percent from 2018. An expected global slowdown in economic prosperity, paired with internal pressures to cut spending, is driving organizations to optimize enterprise external spend for business services such as consulting. In a recent Gartner study, 46 percent of organizations indicated that IT services and supplier consolidation was in their top three most-effective cost-optimization approaches.”
Companies stating they have reached digital scale has nearly double since last year, at 33% versus 17% in 2018, according to Gartner’s 2019 CIO Agenda Survey. Their focus has shifted to managing cloud challenges such as infrastructure management, orchestration, compliance, security, user experience, and performance optimization.
While the move to the public cloud will result in cost savings and increased flexibility, it represents a fundamental shift for most CIOs and IT executives from a control and visibility standpoint. This challenge is being addressed by companies like Eplexity through training and transparency in public cloud adoption design patterns. With a better understanding of optimization opportunities, the migration process, and ongoing management SLAs, IT executives and CIOs are more comfortable swapping control for the elasticity provided by the public cloud.
For more information on optimizing your infrastructure, migrating to the public cloud, architecture on demand, DevOps as a service, or managed cloud services, drop us a line, we’re here to make your cloud experience simple, straightforward, and pain free.
