IDC predicts boom times for public cloud market

The latest figures from IDC on the public cloud market predict sharp increases in spending, with annual growth rates of 27.6 per cent until 2015.

In its report IDC said the public cloud would be worth $72.9bn in 2015, up from $21.5bn last year, and would account for nearly half of all IT spending in applications, application development and deployment, systems infrastructure software, basic storage and server sales.

"Cloud services are interconnected with and accelerated by other disruptive technologies, including mobile devices, wireless networks, big data analytics, and social networking," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

"Together, these technologies are merging into the industry's third major platform for long-term growth. As during the mainframe and PC eras, the new platform promises to radically expand the users and uses of information technology, leading to a wide and entirely new variety of intelligent industry solutions."

Overall software-as-a-service (SaaS) spending will account for around three-quarters of the market for public cloud systems, with options like infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) primarily coming from cloud vendors, rather than from individual suppliers.

The US is leading the field at the moment, with around 50 per cent of the public cloud market. However, the analyst firm found that the rest of the world is catching up fast, with untapped demand in Europe and Asia.

Public cloud may be booming, but it still lags behind the fuller functionality of private clouds, particularly in areas such as security, the report found. However, public cloud protocols are likely to advance to follow private cloud standards in the long term.