According to a new Gartner forecast, global end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 23.1% to $332.3 billion in 2021, up from $270 billion in 2020.
"The events of the past year have enabled CIOs to overcome any hesitation to move critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud," Sid Nag, vice president of Gartner's research program, wrote in a press release. - Even if there is no pandemic, there will still be less desire to rely on data centers."
"New technologies such as containerization, virtualization, and edge computing are becoming more prevalent, driving up cloud spending. Simply put, the pandemic has served as a catalyst for CIOs' interest in the cloud," Nag writes.
Despite constraining macroeconomic factors, offerings that support or provide public cloud services are showing tremendous growth. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is expected to reach $122.6 billion in sales in 2021, according to Gartner, as demand for compliant applications requires a different type of SaaS interaction (see Table 1). Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and workplace-as-a-Service (DaaS) will see the highest spending growth in 2021 – 38.5% and 67.7%, respectively – as CIOs will constantly be faced with the need to scale infrastructure to support the migration of complex workloads to the cloud and hybrid workforce needs.
As organizations expand their global COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing and distribution efforts, SaaS applications that enable critical tasks such as automation and supply chain provisioning are more in demand than ever. Such applications continue to demonstrate reliability in scaling vaccine management, which in turn will help CIOs gain even more confidence in the ongoing transition to the cloud.
"It's important to note that the use and adoption of the cloud, which has served organizations well during this crisis, will look different in the years ahead," Nag writes. - It will evolve further, from serving the primary needs of infrastructure and application migration to ones that integrate the cloud with artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 5G, and other technologies."
"In other words, the cloud will serve as a bridge between many other technologies that CIOs will want to use more of, allowing them to jump into the next century and solve more complex and entirely new problems. It will be a revolutionary market, to say the least," Nag writes.
