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According to a new IDC prediction, revenue for combined Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS workloads would reach $400 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.8% for the forecast period of 2021-2025.
By revenue share, application development and testing, structured data management, and structured data analytics will be the most popular workload sectors.
With CAGRs of 41.9 percent and 41.2 percent, respectively, unstructured data analytics/data management and media streaming are expected to be the fastest expanding segments. Other business applications, file and print, and content applications will expand at a slower rate than the overall market, but will still rise by double digits throughout the projected period.
“Enterprise spending on public cloud infrastructure continues to grow faster than traditional IT infrastructure segments,” said Andrew Smith, research manager Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC. “We expect all workload segments to grow in the double digits – some slightly faster than others – as enterprises emerge from 2020 and continue to prioritize workload migration and modernization using public cloud infrastructure.”
Compute, Storage, Networking
Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are essential enablers for the future of digital infrastructure, according to IDC. The ability of complex, linked cloud infrastructure to self-regulate and dynamically optimize itself in response to real-time changes in resource demand, application performance, and end-user experience is critical to the future of digital infrastructure.
IDC predicts that by 2022, over half of an enterprise’s products and services will be digital or provided digitally, putting a greater demand on infrastructure (compute, storage, and networking) to support more than traditional business applications. To sustain the flexible, resilient, secure, and compliant digital business models of the future, timely access to innovative infrastructure resources – both shared and dedicated – will be critical.
The following are some other trends that are driving workload increase in this market according to IDC:
- As IT businesses reassess budgets, construct infrastructure focused on business resilience, and move toward operating effectively and controlling risk in a post-COVID-19 environment, public cloud services remain a vital part of organizational recovery plan.
- On the public cloud, businesses are shifting from workload migration to workload modernization. In 2020, we observed IaaS buyers increasingly prioritize application modernization initiatives, perceiving modernization as an intrinsic component of the transition toward agile application delivery and cloud operations.
- Enterprise data growth continues to force many workloads to the public cloud, as companies try to keep up with the pace of data expansion while keeping their IT budgets in check. Cloud infrastructure and application platforms may often help address this need by allowing for flexible and consistent capacity scaling that can be used on demand.
The report, ‘Worldwide Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS Workloads Forecast, 2021–2025’ offers IDC’s combined public cloud IaaS and PaaS forecast, which includes worldwide revenue for IaaS and PaaS workloads for the forecast period of 2021–2025. The forecast segments workloads by revenue for the public cloud, and it adds to IDC’s existing workloads research for servers (Worldwide Server Workloads Forecast, 2020–2024: Investment Expands Despite the Ongoing Pandemic) and storage systems (Worldwide External Enterprise Storage Systems Infrastructure for Workloads Forecast, 2021–2025).
