Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure market growth expected to accelerate to 21% in 2015

For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totaled $26.4 billion, up 18.7% year over year from $22.3 billion; private cloud spending was just under $10.0 billion, up 20.7% year over year, while public cloud spending was $16.5 billion, up 17.5% year over year.

For this second quarterly release of IDC’s Cloud IT market forecast, IDC has expanded its worldwide coverage to include detail for eight regions: Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), Canada, Central & Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin America, Middle East & Africa, USA, and Western Europe. In 2015, Western Europe is expected to have the highest growth in cloud IT infrastructure spending at 32%, followed by Latin America (23%), Japan (22%), and the US (21%).

For the five-year forecast period, IDC expects that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14%; both public cloud and private cloud are expected to grow at the same CAGR. By 2019, IDC expects cloud IT infrastructure spending to be $52 billion, or 45% of total IT infrastructure spend; public cloud will represent about $32 billion of that amount, and private cloud will account for the remaining $20 billion.

"The pace of adoption of cloud-based platforms will not abate for quite some time, resulting in cloud IT infrastructure expansion continuing to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market for the foreseeable future," said Kuba Stolarski, Research Manager, Server, Virtualization and Workload Research at IDC. "As the market evolves into deploying 3rd Platform solutions and developing next-gen software, organizations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud solutions."